Summary

Sean Kanan reveals that Mike Barnes is still trying to “make things right” in
Cobra Kai
Season 6 as he helps train Miyagi-Do for the upcoming Sekai Taikai.
After terrorizing Daniel LaRusso as a teenager, Mike Barnes first shows up in Season 5 of
Cobra Kai
and ends up mending fences with his former All Valley Tournament opponent.
In the Season 5 finale, Daniel LaRusso, Mike Barnes, Johnny Lawrence and Chozen Toguchi’s camaraderie clearly comes through on-screen, and those four actors also share a special friendship away from the set.

Seeing Sean Kanan’s Mike Barnes roll up into Terry Silver’s (Thomas Ian Griffith) palatial estate flanked by Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and Chozen Toguchi (Yuji Okumoto), during the Season 5 finale of Cobra Kai, was an unforgettable, jaw-dropping moment for fans of The Karate Kid franchise. Barnes began as a one-dimensional villain in The Karate Kid Part III (1989), but the character found redemption during his brief appearances on the Netflix series. And Kanan reveals that Mike is still looking to “make things right.” The actor said in an interview with TV Insider:

“It was great to have a more multi-dimensional character.
In The Karate Kid III, the character is really just a unidimensional thug,
and now we see that he’s had a redemption arc with apologizing to Daniel.
And [he] has gone through the pain of having his furniture store burned down —
and his wife divorce[d] him.”

Kanan won a Daytime Emmy Award in 2021 for the show he helped create: Studio City. Kanan starred as an aging soap opera actor named Sam Stevens, who played the part of Dr. Pierce Hartley. However, fans are probably more familiar with the thespian’s most prolific work as Deacon Sharpe on The Bold and the Beautiful, but now it’s Mike Barnes’ time to shine again as he helps prepare Miyagi-Do for their toughest competition ever. Kanan said in the same sit-down:

“I think Barnes has not only considered his actions of the past but realizes that he was manipulated just like they were by Terry Silver.
I mean, he even says in Season 5, ‘What kind of guy hires one young kid to… to terrorize another kid?’
So, Barnes wants to do what he can to make things right.”

Sean Kanan’s On-Screen & Real-Life Cobra Kai Friendships

Mike Barnes means business in Cobra Kai Season 6. After cleaning up a couple of loose ends for Johnny (Zabka), once he regained consciousness in the Season 5 finale, Mike Barnes (Kanan) and Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) parted ways as Chozen (Okumoto) was helped into an ambulance. It was a touching way to wrap up a story that ended with the four men coming together as friends. In real-life, that bond extends beyond the Netflix series. Kanan breaks down his on and off-screen friendship with Macchio, Zabka and Okumoto in the same interview:

“He finds himself in this unlikely friendship with Daniel and Johnny Lawrence and Chozen.
First of all,
I’ve known Billy [Zabka] since 1987.
I was doing a TV show called Werewolf for Fox. I was the guest star and John J. York [who plays Mac Scorpio] from General Hospital was the star of the show.
The other guest star on the show was Billy Zabka’s best friend.

So, Billy showed up on set and hung out for a day and I got to know him,
and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is great. This is Johnny Lawrence.’
I had just seen the Karate Kid movies a couple of years before in the theater,
having no idea that within a year, I was going to be not only a part of the Karate Kid franchise, but I would be a member of the Cobra Kai family.
I mean, it was just crazy.”

Related Cobra Kai Season Six to Feature Karate Kid Character(s) Who Haven’t Appeared on Show Yet Cobra Kai’s co-showrunner, Josh Heald, teases “returning faces in Season 6 from the franchise who have not been on the show before.”

Part of the fun when it comes to being a fan of the vaunted Miyagiverse is seeing characters from The Karate Kid films return in Cobra Kai. But there’s something very special about watching Daniel also make peace with his primary opponents from the first three movies (Johnny, Chozen and Mike), which the showrunners take even further as they imbue such satisfaction for the diehards to revel in and geek out about while witnessing the four men become friends in adulthood. Kanan continued his interview with TV Insider by saying (below):

“It was great to go back in Season 6 [to] work again with Ralph and with Yuki and Billy.
Yuji I know really well. He’s a terrific guy.
He has been very involved with a martial arts tournament that we have in my hometown of Newcastle, Pennsylvania to honor my late sensei, Fumio Demara.

Billy and I just get along great, and Ralph is wonderful.
It was great to reconnect with these guys as an adult.
You’ve got kids, you’ve got this career, and we had much, much more in common at this point in our lives than we did back then.”

Cobra Kai
Season 6 — Part 1 drops Thursday, July 18 exclusively on
Netflix.