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Photo courtesy of Ethan Melisano.
Ethan Melisano, left, and Jacob Bertrand on the set of the Netflix series “Cobra Kai” during filming for season 4 of the show.
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Photo by Erin Nelson.
Ethan Melisano, a coach at Spartan Fitness and professional MMA fighter, works with Jonathan Saffo, 5, during the Kids Martial Arts class Jan. 31. Melisano worked as a stunt man with Jacob Bertrand in season 4 of the Netflix show “Cobra Kai” that was released Dec. 31.
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After years of playing baseball, basketball and football, Ethan Melisano got bored. So, he started training in martial arts in 2011 and began coaching at Spartan Fitness in Homewood in 2014.
Now, he is not only a mixed martial arts coach at Spartan and an amateur fighter, but also a professional stuntman. Melisano starred in the newly released season of Netflix’s “Cobra Kai,” a spin-off of the beloved film franchise, “The Karate Kid.”
Melisano’s “side hustle” began in 2018. A film called “Embattled,” about a young, up and coming MMA fighter and his relationship with his abusive father, was being shot in Birmingham and the film crew rented Spartan Fitness’ facility to practice stunts and learn MMA.
“Chris (owner of Spartan Fitness) was paying me to come in and help the actors,” Melisano said. “We were kind of giving them a crash course on MMA. I worked with them and Chris said he was good friends with a guy named Don Lee, the stunt coordinator on ‘Embattled.’ He ended up asking me and cast me to play a Russian MMA fighter for the opening scene in the movie.”
Don Lee has worked as a stunt coordinator on several popular film and television productions including “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” and “Daredevil.”
After working with Lee for a few years through Chris Connolley, owner of Spartan Fitness, Lee called Melisano directly to ask him if he would be interested in working with him on a new project he was working on.
Melisano said after Lee asked about his height and asked him to send him a headshot, he offered him a job to be the stunt double for one of Cobra Kai’s main characters, Hawk, for the show’s fourth season.
“When Don hit me up and asked me if I was cool with shaving my head and I said ‘yeah,’ he said ‘Cool, you start tomorrow. It’s for Cobra Kai,’’' Melisano said.
He said he’s been a fan of the show and has just finished watching the show’s newest season on Netflix. “[Hawk] was really the star of this season,” Melisano said. “He won the All-Valley Tournament.”
He said he will also be in Cobra Kai’s fifth season, which ended filming in January.
Melisano has worked with famous actors before. A few months after Melisano finished filming “Embattled,” he was asked to be a stunt double for famous Spider-Man star Tom Holland in “The Devil All the Time,” a Netflix original movie that was filmed in Alabama in 2018, he said.
Not only did Melisano work on the previz -- the test footage for a fight scene’s choreography to visualize how it would look on camera -- he also taught Holland the fight choreography for a fight scene in the movie as well as being the stunt double for Holland’s hand, he said.
“He didn’t really need me,” Melisano said. “There was a fight scene where he had to slam a car hood on somebody… When the time came, I just showed Tom what the choreography was and then he shot the scene himself.”
He also worked with popular action stars Dolph Lundgren and Scott Atkins in the action film “Castle Falls.” Being able to rub elbows and work with well-known actors is “all about who you know,” Melisano said.
“The casting director for ‘Embattled,’ I talked to him and I got my parents and my brother to get on as extras,” Melisano said. “So when ‘Castle Falls’ was being shot here in Birmingham, they reached out to me about doing an audition. I walked in and Dolph Lundgren, the guy that was in Rocky, was just sitting there.”
Lundgren asked to see some of Melisano’s matches from his professional fights because he wanted to see how he moves, he said.
Though Melisano is currently working as a coach and stunt worker, he said, his primary focus is his career as a professional fighter.
“I’m pursuing it as more of a side job,” Melisano said. “I’ve gotten to work on a movie every year so far but to be honest I still want to pursue fighting. If I ever felt like those doors were starting to close, I’d probably pursue stunt work.”
Melisano started his amateur fighting career in 2012, he said, and is now expecting to make his professional debut in early fall of this year.
He was expected to make it last year, he said, but had to pull out due to a knee injury while training.
“I was doing some flexible stuff and popped my knee,” Melisano said.
Cobra Kai’s fourth season has received national critical-acclaim, earning itself an “Outstanding Action Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Comedy or Drama Series” nomination at the 28th Screen Actors Guild Awards.
“I got an email, they’re going to send me a nomination certificate and everything,” Melisano said.
Melisano said he was surprised by the nomination. Since he began doing stunt work, he said, he never thought he would be a part of a production as big as Cobra Kai, let alone being nominated for an award.
“I never thought I’d work on anything too big,” “Everything else that I’ve done has been fairly small, ten million, fifteen million dollar films so when I got the opportunity to work on Cobra Kai, that was a really cool experience.”
