Here I am, toe to toe with De Niro every night.” “I just wish I soaked it in a little more. “It was all moving pretty fast,” he recalls. In 1986, with The Karate Kid Part II in theatres and a third movie on the horizon, Macchio got a chance to stretch, as the struggling son of the drug dealer played by Robert De Niro in the Broadway drama Cuba and His Teddy Bear. Macchio felt he was ageing out of the character, but the character wasn’t ageing out of him – at least as far as the entertainment industry was concerned. Then the 1980s started tilting toward the 1990s.

“And if he got in a fight, he had nothing to back it up but being a wise guy. He was smart,” Kamen says in a phone interview. To Robert Mark Kamen, who wrote the movie’s screenplay, Macchio was the natural choice: He mixed a “pugnacious attitude” with emotional vulnerability. Photograph: Nancy Moran/Sygma via Getty Images Ralph Macchio, C Thomas Howell and Matt Dillon on the set of The Outsiders, directed and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. “If I ever did get this part and the movie hit, I would have to carry this label for the rest of my life!” But he “found some of the high school storyline characters a bit corny and stereotyped”. “I recall connecting to the father-and-son elements and heart in the story right off the bat,” Macchio writes of his first reading of the screenplay. It was set to be directed by John G Avildsen, who had made the underdog classic Rocky. The screenplay was based on an article about a bullied kid who learned martial arts for self-defence. After his first movie, Up the Academy, and a one-season stint on US TV network ABC’s Eight Is Enough, he landed the career-changing role of the “lost puppy” Johnny Cade, opposite his fellow teen idols C Thomas Howell and Matt Dillon, in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders.īack home, Macchio, then 21 years old, got called for another audition. (His brother took more to the family laundromat and pump-truck businesses.)Īlong with roles in school plays and dance recitals, Macchio started auditioning for advertisements. Soon enough, he was taking tap-dancing lessons in between Little League games and working Saturdays with his dad. Growing up on Long Island, Macchio would watch MGM movie musicals with his mother. I recall connecting to the father-and-son elements and heart in the story right off the bat,” Macchio writes of his first reading of the screenplay

It’s something he shares with Daniel LaRusso, “the every-kid next door”, he explains, who “had no business winning anything”. On a sunny rooftop terrace in lower Manhattan, Macchio – a not at all 60-looking 60, even with his sunglasses off – displays the natural relatability that has been a hallmark of his career. It teaches and inspires through pure entertainment”. Looking back, he writes, the original film is “a prime example of when Hollywood gets it all right.

Ralph macchio karate kid 3 weight