The role Hilary Swank refused to reprise: “A respectful pass on even the idea of a meeting”
Hilary Swank turned down the opportunity to have a guest appearance on an award-winning television show.
Hilary Swank is one of the rare actresses with two Academy Award victories on her resume; she was first awarded for her transgressive role in the controversial 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry, and again for her performance in Clint Eastwood’s heartbreaking sports drama Million Dollar Baby.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Swank is one of the most accomplished actresses of her generation, which makes it easy to forget that one of her earliest roles was in a critically-reviled spinoff of The Karate Kid.
1984’s The Karate Kid was directed by John Avildsen, the filmmaker behind Rocky, and it captured the same sensational feeling as Sylvester Stallone’s rousing boxing epic. The Karate Kid was such a sensation that making sequels was logical, even if Ralph Macchio began to look far too old to realistically play a high school student by the time that the franchise reached its third entry.
The Karate Kid: Part III was the worst-reviewed and least successful of the franchise, and it signified that Macochio needed to move on. However, Columbia Pictures was so desperate to take advantage of one of the most powerful assets that they decided to develop a fourth instalment that would essentially serve as a “soft reboot” by introducing a new protagonist.
The Next Karate Kid was the first film in the franchise to not be director by Avildsen, as filmmaker Christopher Cain took over; although Pat Morita reprised his role as Mr Miyagi, a part that had earned him an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for the first film, the rest of the cast was composed of new additions to the series.
Among them was Swank, who starred as the new protagonist Julie Pierce. Similar to Daniel LaRusso in the original The Karate Kid, Julie is a struggling kid who finds serenity and purpose by following the training of Mr Miyagi and learning karate.
It was blatantly obvious that The Next Karate Kid was a desperate attempt to revitalize the franchise, and it was reflected in the response to the film; in addition to nasty reviews, The Next Karate Kid became the first entry in the saga to seriously underperform at the box office. Swank, in all likelihood, never expected that she’d be asked to reprise her role; the next film in The Karate Kid franchise was a 2010 remake that starred Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan.
The Karate Kid series somehow found another life thanks to the streaming series Cobra Kai, which focused on the character Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka), the bully who had to make amends with LaRusso by the end of the first film. While it began as a low-budget series on the defunct streaming platform YouTube Red, Cobra Kai was taken over by Netflix and became an acclaimed series that drew in many characters from the previous films.
Although Cobra Kai would have given Swank the opportunity to reprise her role as Julie, co-creator Josh Heald said that she made “a respectful pass on even the idea of a meeting” because she was working on another project and couldn’t commit. It doesn’t seem like Swank will be in any danger of being asked to come back to the franchise anytime soon; Cobra Kai just wrapped up its final season, and the theatrical sequel Karate Kid: Legends underperformed, suggesting the franchise was over on the big screen.
