Courtney Henggeler, who starred as Amanda LaRusso in all six seasons of Netflix’s “Cobra Kai” series, is moving on from acting, she wrote in a Substack post on March 30.
“After 20 plus years of fighting the good fight in the acting business, I hung up my gloves on Friday,” she wrote. “I called my agents and told them I was tapping out. I no longer wanted to be a cog in the wheel of the machine. When prompted to know what I did want to do, I simply replied ‘I want to be the machine.’”
“Cobra Kai” wrapped up its run after seven years in February. It originally debuted on “YouTube Red” as an original series on the now-defunct streaming platform. After two season on YouTube, the “Karate Kid” prequel series moved to Netflix for four more seasons. The final Season 6 was split up in six parts, due to the writers and actors strikes, and released in July 2024, November 2024 and February 2025.
Henggeler starred as Amanda LaRusso, the wife of Ralph Macchio’s Daniel LaRusso and the mother to Samantha (Mary Mouser) and Anthony (Griffin Santopietro).
“All I’ve ever known in my professional life was acting,” Henggeler wrote. “But not even the art or craft of acting. All I’ve truly ever knew was the hustle. The hustle, the grind, sprinkled occasionally with the odd acting job. Perhaps a line or two to TV’s Dr. House – ‘Sorry’ (that’s it. That was my line. Genius) Nailed it. Or a recurring guest-star that never seemed to recur…. Whatever the opposite of nailing it is. And when all was said and done (or mimed. Sometimes, you gotta mime) it was back to the grind. Back to the wheel. Back to the machine.”
Her first TV credit was on an episode of “House” in 2005, and she recently appeared on the big screen in George Clooney’s “The Boys in the Boat.”
“What if we choose to believe we have the power?” she wrote. “What if we had it all along? What if we have been handing our power away because we have been told that this is how it is done. We lose perspective on our own machine, because we are convinced we need another. We wait for power to be bestowed upon us. We sign up for the gauntlets. We run the gauntlet, to prove our worth. To earn our place. To be crowned the power. What if we never needed to run the gauntlet? What if we are the gauntlet?”