‘Cobra Kai’ Star Quits Acting After More Than 20 Years

Courtney Henggeler has wrapped her last shoot in Hollywood.

The 46-year-old Cobra Kai actress shared on her personal Substack blog last month that she had officially retired from the acting business.

“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.’”

Henggeler played Amanda LaRusso on all six seasons of the hit Netflix martial-arts series. According to her blog post, reflecting on her career helped her realize that despite her constant attempts to chase “the golden goose,” her star-making moment never materialized.

“All I’ve ever known in my professional life was acting,” she said. “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)…or a recurring guest-star that never seemed to recur…”

It’s not as if the actress hasn’t been all over the screen before; she’s known for her roles in Jane the Virgin, Faking It, and Mom. Her most notable roles besides Cobra Kai were as Sheldon Cooper’s twin sister Missy in The Big Bang Theory and as Hazel Ulbrickson in George Clooney’s 2023 sports biopic The Boys in the Boat. Henggeler acknowledged as such in the rest of the blog.

“20 plus years of this. I’m hungry. And I’m considered one of the lucky ones. I was on a series. A successful series. I made money. My face was on the billboards I longed for 20 plus years. I was directed by George Clooney for godsakes,” she wrote.

Even despite a moderate amount of success, she still never felt fulfilled in her career.

“For years I silenced the voice in my head, begging me to walk away. The voice, the constant gnawing. Not because of the acting itself. But because of the gauntlet I had to run to reach the acting,” she wrote “What once felt necessary, something I willingly participated, even celebrated, became stifling.”

She ended her post with a series of inspirational questions.

“What if we choose to believe we have the power? 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?”