Karate Kid: Legends exclusive first look unites Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio around the next generation

“Karate Kid: Legends” star Ben Wang and director Jonathan Entwistle preview the “action-packed” new entry into the Miyagi-verse.

Ben Wang first fell in love with the Karate Kid franchise at a movie theater in 2010, watching Jaden Smith’s Dre Parker practice “jacket on, jacket off” with his sensei, Mr. Han (Jackie Chan).

“I was the target audience when that movie came out. I was exactly the age of the character,” Wang tells Entertainment Weekly. “That whole movie takes place in Beijing, and I’d just come back from living for a year in Beijing. Also, I grew up watching Jackie Chan movies. He is the first memory I have of knowing what an actor is. It was all of my favorite things in one place.”

Thirteen years later, Sony announced a global casting search for a new Karate Kid, who would costar alongside Chan and OG Kid Ralph Macchio in a new film directed by Jonathan Entwistle. By that time, Wang already had a lead role on the martial-arts-heavy Disney+ series American Born Chinese and a working knowledge of Taekwondo, but he didn’t immediately consider himself for the role. “I thought, ‘That’s going to be awesome for whatever kid gets it,'” he recalls with a laugh.

Humility aside, Wang beat out over 10,000 other wax-on, wax-off hopefuls to land the role of Karate Kid: Legends‘ Li Fong, a Beijing-based teenager who moves to New York City with his mother (Ming-Na Wen). The teen’s transition to the Big Apple is, in a word, sour: Li has trouble fitting in at his new school, and he keeps getting dragged into fights he would very much like to avoid. According to Sony’s official plot synopsis, “When a new friend needs his help, Li enters a karate competition — but his skills alone aren’t enough. Li’s kung fu teacher Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) enlists original Karate Kid Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) for help, and Li learns a new way to fight, merging their two styles into one for the ultimate martial arts showdown.”

But how does Mr. Han know about Daniel LaRusso? Where does Mr. Miyagi (the late Pat Morita) fit into the story? And what’s the connection between Legends and Netflix’s Cobra Kai? EW pummeled Wang and Entwistle for answers — politely, of course.

JONATHAN ENTWISTLE: Well, I was originally sent the script in early 2022. It had all the pieces in it for Ben’s character, Li, but it had a very different ending. One of the things that was really exciting to me when I first read it was this idea of connecting the Jackie Chan character of Mr. Han with Daniel LaRusso, both from the movies and then subsequently what [his character] had become with Cobra Kai. When I first read the script, Cobra Kai was nowhere near as far along as it is now. It all germinated at kind of the same time.

Ben, you sent in a tape of yourself for your first audition. Did you show off any martial arts skills in that video?

BEN WANG: I did do martial arts. I was actually visiting my mom in China at the time. My mom worked in the countryside in this school in a rural province, and I got the email on my phone. They were like, “They want to see you do some martial arts.” So, I made the tape in the gymnasium of her school. [To Jonathan] I don’t know if you guys ever looked at that and went, “Where the hell is he?” [Laughs]

JE: It was very important that we could have somebody who could speak Mandarin, and who could do martial arts, and we also wanted someone who was an amazing actor. Those three things are really, really difficult to find. We started watching the many, many, many [audition] tapes, and a lot of people could do one or two of the three, but it was really difficult to find the holy trinity. When we first saw Ben’s tape, we were like, “Wow, this kid is in rural China. We found this guy who’s in the middle of nowhere. Wow, this is amazing,” only to find out that he’s from Minnesota. [Laughs] But that also helped us because Ben could fluently understand the Mandarin and the American side of what the story was all about.

Ben Wang in ‘Karate Kid: Legends’.Jonathan Wenk

Ben, what background do you have in martial arts?

BW: The truth is I have a little bit of experience in a lot of different kinds of martial arts, but most of it was after-school Taekwondo that I was doing when I was in grade school. It was really fun, and I had some great teachers, but that’s not really on the level that would prepare you to do a movie like this. The majority of the stuff that you see in the movie is what I worked on with the amazing stunt team led by our stunt coordinators, Larry Lam and Peng Zhang. I trained with them for about a month and a half before we started shooting. We trained five days a week, but I was practicing on my own on the weekends, so it was just nonstop.

Jackie Chan, Ben Wang and Ralph Macchio in ‘Karate Kid: Legends’.Jonathan Wenk

By bringing Mr. Han and Daniel LaRusso together, the movie establishes that the OG Karate Kid and the 2010 Karate Kid exist in the same universe, a.k.a. the Miyagi-verse. Jonathan, how do Mr. Han and Daniel-san come together in this story?

JE: Without giving too much away, I can say that Mr. Han and Mr. Miyagi are the connection to Daniel. The Han family and the Miyagi family are connected all the way back to the old times. And there is a mention of this within the Karate Kid movie canon for those people who want to go looking for it.

And how would you describe Jackie Chan’s presence on set?

JE: Apart from being a wonderful human being who is very warm, he is the type of actor that does not leave. When his day is done, you would often find him sitting next to me, sitting next to the DP, telling stories, talking to the actors. Jackie Chan is a movie star, and that is something that you don’t see so much anymore. He had the ability to come up with a tiny idea that I’d never thought of — and all of Jackie’s tiny ideas are in the movie. He was like the magical Dumbledore to us on set, and he’s like that in the movie too.

Can you give me an example of one of his tiny ideas?

JE: There’s a wonderful fight sequence in the movie, which I’m not going to spoil, and Jackie had the idea to jump out at Ben from a random corner of this space, without Ben even knowing where he was going to be. He wanted to jump out from the spot that would have the most effect. He was always looking for an opportunity to either roll on the floor, roll over a table, jump off a staircase — he would just be like, “I will do this.” None of us ever had a choice. It was like, Jackie would have an idea, and we just filmed it because it’s Jackie, and it would always be awesome.

Jackie Chan and Ben Wang in ‘Karate Kid: Legends’.Jonathan Wenk

Some of the movie takes place in New York City, and according to those who saw the teaser at New York Comic-Con, there are fights in very New York locales, like the subway. Jonathan, how else do you incorporate the city setting into the story?

JE: It’s the idea of — in a classic Karate Kid sense — the fish out of water. Ben’s character, Li, is finding his way around the city, and he gets embroiled in the middle of something that’s going to force him to have to stand up and fight. I was really excited about how can we make New York feel like a character — not just visually, but how can it interact with the way he’s feeling and what he’s doing? We piece that together by shooting on location, and we built some pieces of New York [on soundstages]. There are a lot of areas that really involve the skyline of Manhattan, and you see little hints of that in the poster for the movie. It was important that it felt like we were getting some joy from the action sequences, and fighting and training in the city really gives you that.

Ben, give us a preview of the most challenging scene you had to shoot.

BW: Our stunt team and the whole crew were so excellent that these fight scenes — which are very, very, very difficult to execute — they had plans for every contingency, for everything that needed to be done. They were really long and really hard days, but it never felt impossible. It is not super sexy, but on movies like this, really the hardest stuff is when you have to pretend it’s summer, but it’s winter, and it’s 30 degrees, and you’re wearing a T-shirt, and Jonathan goes, [mimics director’s British accent] “Right! Do it again. Go back to ones, start again!” And you’re freezing, you’re trying really hard to act, and you do 17 takes. And then Jonathan goes, “Right, I think we’ll just use the first one.” [Laughs]

JE: Exactly. [Laughs] We set out to make something that was both cinematic and action-packed. The fight sequences, they’re really exciting. My hope is that when you’re sitting in that theater, you’re on the edge of your seat.

Jonathan, you were in contact with the Cobra Kai creators throughout production, and we know this movie takes place after the events in the Cobra Kai series finale. What else can you tell us about how Karate Kid: Legends connects to the world of Cobra Kai?

JE: I have been a huge fan of Cobra Kai right from the beginning, and that’s one of the reasons that I thought this was such an exciting project. I was excited about the idea that the films and the series can all be part of one family. I’ve had some really detailed conversations with the Cobra Kai team about just cool stuff that we can do in the movie and can make this whole thing feel holistic. And obviously, Ralph is really, really close to it after all those years on Cobra Kai, and they’ve been involved in little steps along the way. Everything we talked about made it into the movie in some way or other, either through Ralph or through the conversations. We’re really excited that we’ve added another piece to the overall universe.

Karate Kid: Legends premieres in theaters Friday, May 30, 2025.

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