Meet Courtney Henggeler, the other star of LI’s ‘Cobra Kai’

Ralph Macchio is not the only star of the streaming series “Cobra Kai” who hails from Long Island. The show, a 1984 spin-off “The Karate Kid,” retransmits the Dix Hills-raised actor as Daniel LaRusso – now a family man who runs a successful car dealership – but it turns out that Courtney Henggeler, who plays his wife, Amanda, grew up partly in Seaford.

Henggeler, 42, was working as an actress in Los Angeles and on the verge of giving up when “Cobra Kai” offered her the role of Amanda LaRusso, a suburban wife and mother of two. (Henggeler is also married and has two children.) The show aired on YouTube Premium for two seasons and became a dormant success, earning two Emmy nominations for stunt work; Netflix picked it up for season three, which premiered on January 1. William Zabka, who is reprising his famous role of the enemy from Daniel Johnny Lawrence, is co-producing the series with Macchio.

Henggeler was packing for a trip to Atlanta, where season four will be filming, when she spoke to Newsday by phone from her new home in Huntington. She moved there early last year – before Covid – to be close to her family. “You just can’t leave Long Island,” she said. Here’s an edited version of the conversation.

You moved just in time for all the excitement.

We moved the day the lockdowns started. we hear Huntington is beautiful! We’ll never know, but we hear it is a wonderful city with wonderful restaurants. Maybe one day we will find out. I don’t know if you know Kerber’s Farm? The inside of it looks so cute smelly – but I’ve never been there!

So you are from New Jersey

I was born there, but I think I lived there half a second before my parents moved out. I grew up in Pennsylvania, actually, the Poconos, until I was 14. Then my parents broke up and my mom told me, let’s go back to Long Island. Were people from the South Shore, my parents grew up opposite each other in Seaford.

Where do you go to high school?

Seaford High School, the home of the Vikings! We didn’t have a solid theater program, but I did every play you could do in high school. And I did the Town of Hempstead Teen Rep. We had something called a ‘showmobile’ so we would go to different parks around Hempstead and put on different kids shows on literally a car that would open. It sounds weird but it was a lot of fun.

So what? University?

I went to a SUNY school, Fredonia which is about as far away from Seaford, Long Island as you can get in New York State. I was a major BFA, and it wasn’t clicking with me. So I dropped out of college, much to my parents’ horror. I got a job this summer as a bartender and took classes in town. A year or two later, I moved to Los Angeles. I immediately started booking ads and thought to myself, “It’s easy!” Cut 20 years later: “Finally, I’m on a series!”

So tell me how you got the role of Amanda LaRusso.

I just had my son. I decided to stop playing. I’ve been doing this for so long, since I was in my twenties. It was exhausting and I wasn’t going any further. I said to my husband, “I think I’m done.” He said to me: “It’s amazing. I support you in whatever you want. However, we get our health insurance through SAG [the Screen Actors Guild]. Can you stay a little longer until we find a plan B? “Next week I think I had the audition for ‘Cobra Kai’.

What was it like being on set with Ralph Macchio and William Zabka, actors who go back 35 years together?

Ralph and Billy couldn’t be more charming, but it was very surreal. I called Ralph “Ralph Macchio” – one word. I couldn’t forget it was my husband on TV. And off-set we are talking about our children! Like, am I talking about Ralph Macchio’s kids? He said, “It’s just Ralph. You can just call me Ralph.” It finally ended around season three.

Are there any other projects you are working on besides “Cobra Kai”?

I wrote a Lifetime Movie that aired earlier in the fall. It’s called “The Secret Life of a Celebrity Surrogate”. It is about a girl who becomes the surrogate mother of a powerful Hollywood couple and the dangers that lie there. I write a few movies like this. My focus is comedy, which is what I love to write, but for some reason I ended up in the “female thriller” niche. And I also have a good time writing them.