When I first watched The Karate Kid (1984), one of the actors who resonated with me in a bit part was the bleach blond “Dutch” —the Cobra Kai member who famously tries to fight Daniel LaRusso in the locker room right before the All Valley Karate Tournament is set to start.

At the time, I had no idea who the actor playing him was; and yet there was something about him that made me pay attention, because — as great as Billy Zabka was a Johnny Lawrence — nobody in the Kai scared me as much as Dutch did. His bullying felt very real and very primal. It was almost like he thought he was in a Scorsese film, not an elevated high school drama.

I found out many years later that the actor who played Dutch is Chad McQueen, the only son of iconic movie star Steve McQueen. After which his performance — small though it was — made sense: his father had the ability to say very little and yet you were drawn to him. There was a presence Steve McQueen had that, in this brief scene in what became a surprise hit in the summer of 1984, it was evident his son shared.

Chad McQueen never really did much of real note in Hollywood. He appeared in a raft of mostly straight-to-video movies post-Karate Kid, and never achieved any sort of stardom or acclaim as an actor. Still, he seems to have lived a pretty good life in the shadow of a famous father. Born in 1960 to McQueen and Philippine actress Neille Adams, Chad followed up his acting career by founding McQueen Racing, a company specializing in performance vehicles. Like his father, the younger McQueen raced cars until a near-fatal crash left him in a coma for a month and resulted in his having screws and plates surgically installed to stabilize his spinal column.