Kreese From 'Cobra Kai' Got Sent Home For Biting His Co-Star

An excuse to write about my favorite genre of person, the Hollywood Blowhard.

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Photo by Roger Kisby/Getty Images for Netflix

I’ve interviewed a lot of famous and semi-famous people over the years. Don’t get too impressed, this mostly looked like talking to someone on the phone for 15 minutes, and most were set up as part of the promotional process for bad movies we all knew even at the time that no one would remember in six months or so. Watch Dolph Lundgren’s cheap streamer and get to hear his stories about Studio 54 is usually how that goes. A fine trade-off!

I digress, but of all the actors I’ve spoken to over the years, probably my favorite genres of interviewee are 1). Kooky character actors in their first brush with fame (see: Keith Williams Richards, the heavy from Uncut Gems; or the late Biff Wiff from I Think You Should Leave, who was so sweet and genuine in asking me about myself towards the end of it that I get emotional just thinking about it), and 2) Not-that-famous character actors who have been around forever. These kinds of guys (usually guys, but not always) have a million stories, and you often get the sense that they’ve been dying to tell them to anyone who would listen over the years, but many of their closest have long since learned to sort of tune them out as an act of self-preservation. (Patton Oswalt’s old Robert Evans bit comes to mind).

I tend to think of this type as “Old School Hollywood Blowhards.” Tarantino in particular loves to cast this type of guy, I suspect because he also loves hearing Old School Hollywood Blowhard stories.

Possibly the beau ideal of this Type of Guy (at least in my first-hand experience) is Martin Kove, most famous for playing John Kreese in Karate Kid (and now again in Cobra Kai).

Anyway, you know that guy? He apparently got in trouble recently for biting a co-star.

From Variety:

“Karate Kid” actor and “Cobra Kai” TV star Martin Kove was asked to leave a fan convention over the weekend after allegedly biting co-star Alicia Hannah-Kim during a VIP meet-and-greet, according to a report from the Puyallup Police Department obtained by Variety.

How hard does a bite have to be to get the police involved? Asking for my son. (Last night he also said I was a “bad guy” and pretended to saw my head off with the edge of his hand, which seems… not great).

According to the report, Hannah-Kim told an officer working the VIP section that, after tapping Kove on the shoulder to say hello, he suddenly grabbed her arm and bit her “so hard he nearly drew blood.” The report states that when she cried out in pain, Kove allegedly started kissing her arm where he had bitten her. The report detailed that Hannah-Kim then told her husband, who was present at the event, and the pair went to confront Kove about the incident.

Not to keep bringing it back to this, but my son also does this exact kissing-means-I-was-joking move when he bites me too hard.

The report states that upon confronting Kove, he “exploded on them, saying something to the effect of how dare they confront him.” Hannah-Kim and her husband asked the reporting officer to step in and defuse the situation. According to the report, Kove claimed he was trying to be “funny,” adding that they “play fight all the time on the set of ‘Cobra Kai.'” Hannah-Kim reportedly told the officer that she would not file charges, but “wished to have a report filed in case this continues.”

Kove was instructed to leave the venue; the reporting officer advised the actor not to repeat such behavior in the future.

Can you imagine how sad the walk of shame around Puyallup, Washington is after you’ve been asked to leave a fan convention for biting a co-star? Brutal. No way you could enjoy the Ezra Meeker Mansion without the career implications on your mind.

Anyway, here’s a couple great stories Martin Kove told me when I interviewed him in 2019:

I remember going to Greece — it was 1980. It was James Earl Jones, José Ferrer, Lila Kedrova. A movie called Red Tide (Blood Tide, per IMDB -Ed.). And we shot in the southern tip of the Peloponnese. It was in Greece, a city called Monemvasia, which was a Byzantine ruins. So I went to Cannes, and I went with the producer. The producer had an argument with his wife. And they had a 65-foot Ketch, and they were sailing to Capri, Ischia, Taormina, Malta, Corsica, Elba. And they were going to end up in Greece. But he had a fight with his lady, and this was the producer, and he said to me, “Come on the trip.”

We sailed out of Cannes, and it was incredible. And we would read the script, and it would be like a rehearsal. So we were two weeks at sea, and it was rough seas. I’m telling you, rough seas. It was like a force eight the first night out, which is like hurricane time. And so, we read the script over and over and over again. And then I was on location for two months in Monemvasia. So I was away for three months at a time.

At the end of the movie, it was tense, because the money didn’t come through to pay the per diem and the crew. So the crew started carrying guns in Greece, and they seized the negative ultimately. And the day before we did the last scene, the director and I, a young guy, he and I got out on the last hovercraft going to the mainland to Athens. Because they weren’t going to let anybody else off the island who was a member of the crew or the cast, unless this money arrives, it was actually going to be held hostage. …So it was quite interesting, you know?

Right. I mean, you’ve done some of these action movies in these crazy locations. What’s the scariest situation you’ve been in on one of these sets?

That was pretty scary when those guys were coming to the set with guns and the executive producers and the producers wouldn’t even show up on the set. But okay, here’s a much better story. I’m on the set of White Line Fever. And White Line Fever‘s a movie with Jan Michael Vincent, and I’m playing the heavy, Clem. So the stunt guy says to me, it’s a weekend, and he says, “Why don’t you come back to my place.” He knew I loved the West, so he had horses, and he was going to take me back to the Superstition Mountains to ride horses. So we were shooting in Tucson, and he lived in Phoenix. So we drove up there, took my laundry. I took all the laundry, and his mother did my laundry. It’s like 1975. Jonathan Kaplan’s directing this, and it’s a big scene on Monday morning. And now, it’s Sunday night, and we’re driving.

And I’m nodding out. I’m in the passenger seat of his car, and all of sudden I wake up, and I hear tall reeds from the desert and bush hitting the windshield. I turn around and look who’s driving. He’s nodded out on the wheel. I figure this is going to be it. I put my head between my legs. The car is going diagonally off the road, spins around, flips over, ends up facing the other way, and the entire hood is on fire.

We’re in the middle of the desert and this guy is definitely going to die. So I open up the door. I drag him out up to the road. I pulled him out, and the fire has now encompassed the front seat. So I have all my American Express papers, all this shit that you gotta — in those days, when you’d lose a card, you’d have to file triplicates. It was an enormous amount of paperwork if your card was lost or stolen, and I never wanted that to happen. So I dove into the backseat, grabbed my wallet and all the personals, and walked up to the road. The cops came, blah, blah, blah, took him to the hospital, took me to the hospital.

And the joke is that we couldn’t get to the big fight scene that we were training for with Slim Pickens, with L.Q. Jones. It was the climax fight scene that morning on Monday. And it was written up in The Hollywood Reporter, “Big Switch. Martin Kove saves stunt man’s life.” Because usually a stuntman is saving us. Everybody on the set, instead of asking how we were — because I left this guy in a hospital, I got to set, because I didn’t get hurt — everybody was pissed off at me for not showing up. The fact that I almost died, the fact that this guy almost died, didn’t make a bit of difference. You can see the true colors of show business.

Incidentally, I never did track down that Hollywood Reporter story Kove references. It’s probably available in the print archives somewhere if I wanted to go to the library, but I figured it was easier and better for all involved just to take Martin Kove at his word. Also, Kove did go on to work with Tarantino in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (playing the Sheriff in Bounty Law), which lends even more credence to my Tarantino-loves-Hollywood-Blowhards theory. (You think Michael Madsen doesn’t have some stories?).

Now, if you’re thinking that the only thing better than Martin Kove’s Hollywood stories are Hollywood stories about Martin Kove, that seems likely true. Sadly, beyond this biting incident, all I have to go on In this vein is a story Bill Hader told many years ago on WTF (RIP).

Too long to transcribe all of it, but the gist is (all this according to Hader), Hader was working as Kove’s driver on a set. Kove got him lost on purpose, because Kove was trying to kill time so he could finish memorizing the script. Hader got yelled at for being late, and then later when Hader was driving him home, Kove (again, all according to Hader) kept trying to buy him cookies and a milkshake at McDonald’s to apologize.

“So I pull her into McDonald's, he goes ‘What kind of milkshake you want?’ I go ‘Chocolate.’ He goes, ‘Chocolate milkshake, alright I'll give you a chocolate milkshake, chip cookie, I'll be right back. I'm so sorry.’

“He leaves, he comes back out, eating the chocolate chip cookie and drinking the milkshake. And then he just sits in. the back and he goes ‘Come on, let's go.’

“It was the biggest fuck you... It was a weird mind fuck of like, ‘I'm going to get you this thing’ and then he ate it in front of me and I just drove home in silence. That was my first ‘Welcome to Hollywood, kid’ moment. And I came home to all my roommates and I was like ‘You won't believe what just happened to me,” and they all were like dying laughing. I drove him to work every day and I didn't talk to him after that.”

Necessary gif:

For the record, I did get Kove’s response to the Hader story:

“Total fabrication. Not quite clear why he spreads this story. It’s quite uncharacteristic of me to indulge in such a level of being so inconsiderate. I don’t remember him or the event. Maybe he drove me to a set one day, but I really don’t remember him at all. I am truly happy for his success, though. As well as my old friend Henry Winkler’s success.”

There’s nothing more Old School Hollywood guy than managing to work a name drop into your journalistic denial/clarification. I worry that Hollywood is no longer going to be able to produce this Type of Guy, which is why it’s so important to get more of these stories while we still can.

(Henry Winkler worked with Hader on Barry — a fantastic show that was still running at the time — in case you were wondering how that reference could’ve made any sense.)

Neither here nor there, but question for the seven other people who sat through Karate Kid Legends: how much did it bug you that the movie didn’t end with a nose-honk? It was such a perfect opportunity. A movie that existed for callbacks couldn’t even do callbacks right.