Cobra Kai’s Xolo Maridueña Is Taking a Gap Year

The actor Xolo Maridueña moved to New York City for the same reason so many of us do: to figure himself out. Maridueña has been employed since he was a tween. But suddenly, surprisingly—thankfully?—the 23-year-old Los Angeles native found himself with some time to spare ahead of his next gig and thought, Why not try out the opposite coast?

“I’m here because for the first time in 10 years I have six months off,” he says. Now he’s pondering the abiding question: “All right, well, who am I outside of work?”

To find out, Maridueña has been collecting quintessential New York experiences. He shares his Brooklyn apartment with a couple: the fellow actors Jacob Bertrand and Peyton List, with whom he stars on the wildly popular Netflix series Cobra Kai, set 34 years after Ralph Macchio’s Daniel LaRusso triumphs over a swept leg to become the San Fernando Valley’s reigning karate champ in The Karate Kid. (Maridueña’s Miguel Diaz is a riff on Daniel: a scrawny Reseda teen who nourishes his inner underdog via the principles of martial arts.) “It’s like Friends,” he says of his roommates. “It’s been nice to already have a little built-in ecosystem.”

Jacket and pants by Prada. Tank top by Calvin Klein. Necklaces by Miansai.

On this rainy weeknight, Maridueña suggested we meet for omakase—“I am obsessed with sushi”—and, en route to a BYOB spot in Manhattan’s East Village, we make a pit stop at a corner bodega for refreshments. (Maridueña tells me he’s recently grown fond of deli-made sausage, egg, and cheese sandwiches, another NYC rite of passage.) We grab a six-pack of Modelos from the glass-doored fridges in the back, and, as we check out, Maroon 5’s “She Will Be Loved” plays over the sound system.

Then we are, quite literally, out on a corner in the pouring rain.

Maridueña, who is such a chatterbox (his term) that he cohosts the often-autobiographical weekly podcast Lone Lobos with Bertrand, is excited to talk about his new city. “I like the quietness of Brooklyn,” he says. Since landing here, he hasn’t felt too restricted by IRL displays of fandom. “I am very fortunate that I, for better or for worse, have a pretty incognito face. I don’t really be getting recognized like that out and about,” he says, smiling.

Sweater by Kiko Kostadinov. Necklace by Miansai.

Rewind a few years, though, and it was looking unlikely that he’d be able maintain any level of anonymity into his 20s. In 2021 he was cast as the protagonist in the DC Studios movie Blue Beetle, playing fresh college grad Jaime Reyes, who gains powers thanks to an alien scarab’s choosing him as its host and, in turn, becomes DC’s first leading Latino superhero. But the SAG-AFTRA strike threw a wrench into the rollout, and when the movie premiered in August 2023, Maridueña and his costars were unable to participate in its promotion. The megastar-making turn didn’t quite pan out as hoped.

“Everyone was like, ‘You have no idea what is about to happen the day that this movie drops,’” he recalls. “But that weekend ended and I didn’t spontaneously combust, and I didn’t die, and everything was okay, and I watched the movie and I enjoyed it, and I got to sit next to kids who looked like me and they enjoyed it, and some of them cried because they hadn’t seen themselves” in a role like this. As ever, Maridueña is upbeat. “It didn’t leave a bad taste in my mouth in a way that I think it very easily could have.”

Shirt by Connor McKnight. Jeans by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Necklace and bracelet, stylist’s own.

For now, DC is looking to continue Blue Beetle with an animated series, though the details are TBD. (“I think if the rest of their ecosystem is looking great and gravy, then we’ll get to pop back out on the other side.”) Last year Maridueña filmed Killing Castro, which also stars Al Pacino, about Fidel Castro’s fateful 1960 visit to Harlem, and he might soon shoot a romantic drama in Washington State. But for the time being, the NYC self-actualization quest is on.

Brews in hand, we shuffle into the brightly lit restaurant and settle onto two tall wooden stools. Maridueña, wearing a red jacket, dark slacks, and a rolled-up beanie, hangs a small Loewe bag on the chairback and rests his horn-rimmed eyeglasses on the countertop. When Cobra Kai debuted in 2018, he was a baby-faced 16-year-old with spiky hair and braces; now he has a shadowy beard and dark curls to his shoulders. He’s honest in his ambivalence about where he stands on the Hollywood ladder. Listing Robert Pattinson and Oscar Isaac as actors he admires, he says, “Sometimes I sit and I’m like, ‘How am I not further along in these categories?’ Or, ‘How am I not doing more of this?’ Or, ‘How have I not done this yet?’ And I just have to remind myself: I’m doing it in my time. There is no right way to do this.”

Maridueña grew up doing community theater in East LA, with the support of his close, creative family: His mom, Carmelita Ramírez-Sánchez, leads a local nonprofit arts center; his dad, Omar G. Ramírez, is a Chicano artist. At age 11 he landed a role on the NBC tearjerker Parenthood, and then at 16, Cobra Kai, which started out as a YouTube Red original series. He graduated high school while filming Cobra Kai and enrolled at Pasadena City College to study screenwriting. Then the show got picked up by Netflix during the pandemic and gained millions of new eyeballs.

Coming amid Cobra Kai’s success, Blue Beetle could have been a big step for his acting life. But when the movie fell into a box office void, it also created an opportunity for this chapter of self-reflection. “Now that I’m a man—now that I’m officially, without the asterisks, a man,” Maridueña jokes between bites of a persimmon-hued ikura hand roll, before he shifts into a considered tone, “I’ve learned that I value being alone. It’s definitely something that I wasn’t privy to growing up because I have parents and siblings and dogs and friends and always something to do. Now that I’m out here, there are some days where I’m almost completely alone. Having that time, and not have it be filled with the next thing going on, is kind of foreign to me.”

After we wrap our coursed sushi, we meander up Second Avenue, tucking into The Bean coffee shop to escape the rain. He tells me about clubbing, which he determines is better out here than in LA (“I like house music. I like this Boiler Room, Kaytranada-sounding stuff”), dating (“kind of scares me a bit”), and living with a couple (for whom he’ll “probably be a groomsman; I’m already a third wheel”). He’s eager to get back into theater here too: He recently saw his fellow Netflix beneficiaries Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler in Broadway’s Romeo + Juliet.

“Seeing Kit and Rachel, I was like, Wait, they’re doing it. It just made me want to be a part of it,” he says. “[Theater] is a different muscle. If I was doing biceps, I’m trying to do some squats. Trying to do some power lifting right now.”

The night before our interview, Maridueña finished watching the last episodes of Cobra Kai’s sixth and final season, which will arrive just before Valentine’s Day. “It just felt so final,” he says. “Like, Damn, so I guess this is it. I’m so proud of it, I’m so happy with it, but watching those last moments, it was like, I missed it. It was seven awesome years of my life.”

But adulthood, and the promise of new projects, has been awesome too. Tonight, Maridueña is headed to the Comedy Cellar. I leave him with the leftover Modelos as he books it to the subway. “I feel like a jellyfish,” he says. “I’m ready for the wave to take me wherever.”

Jacket by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. T-shirt by Coach. Necklace by Miansai. Bracelet and ring, stylist’s own.

Eileen Cartter is a GQ staff writer.

A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2025 issue of GQ with the title “The Karate Kid Takes a Gap Year”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Marie Tomanova
Styled by Ian McRae
Grooming by Kumi Craig using La Mer
Tailoring by Ksenia Golub