06/27/2026
Taimak was the lead of one of the most beloved Black films ever made, and Berry Gordy never worked with him again. After The Last Dragon hit, Motown put a multi-film contract in front of him, sequels and all, and he turned the whole thing down.
The way he tells it, it was never about the money, it was about how they treated him in that room. He gave up the franchise before he would let anybody make him small.
He showed up to his first movie audition with his gi rolled under his arm, ready to fight.
Taimak Guarriello was nineteen and had never acted a single day in his life. He had just won the New York State kickboxing title, he worked the door at clubs where Diana Ross and Michael Jackson came through, and as far as he was concerned his future was martial arts, not movies.
There was no real money in professional kickboxing, so he had even been weighing whether to go on to college. Acting was about the last thing on his mind.
Then friends mentioned that a film was holding an open call for a young Black kung fu master, and his teacher, the martial arts legend Ron Van Clief, told him to go and try.
So he prepared the only way a fighter knew how. He pictured a mat, some open floor, a place to throw a kata and let his body say what he could not put into words.
He packed his uniform and walked in on faith.
It was a desk, a chair, and a stack of pages.
The reading fell apart. In his own telling, he had expected a karate exhibition, a place to perform, and what he found was an ordinary casting office and lines he had no clue how to deliver.
Most people take that kind of no and head home. Taimak asked for the script and a month.
He worked those pages the way he worked a heavy bag, the same lines again and again until they stopped sounding like a stranger's. Then he came back and read a second time, this round in front of the man whose name sat over the whole production, Motown founder Berry Gordy.
He got it. The lead in a major studio picture, his first time ever, at nineteen.
To see why he fit, you have to know where he came from. He was born in 1964, when the marriage that made him, an Italian father and an African-American mother, was still against the law across much of the country.
His father was a doo-wop singer who once caught hate mail simply for marrying a Black woman. His mother was a soul food cook out of Harlem who, during a stretch of his childhood in London, ran what people called the first soul food restaurant in that entire city.
He had started karate at six, after a single glimpse of Bruce Lee on a television set showed him the standard he meant to hold himself to. By the time the cameras rolled he was a titled fighter, calm and grown, who had already handed half his life to the dojo.
The film was The Last Dragon, and the part was Leroy Green, a gentle, Bruce Lee-obsessed kid from the same New York streets that raised Taimak. Leroy ate his popcorn with chopsticks and chased something the movie called the Glow, the final level of mastery where a true master's whole body lights up.
The production even let him help choose his leading lady. They sat him down with tapes of beautiful actresses, and Taimak passed on the polished soap opera names and picked the singer Vanity for a charisma the others did not have.
He loved being there. Going to the set every day, he said, was like walking into a comic book, a great comic book, where everybody was full of life and everybody had something.
That joy was the whole point of the thing. In the spring of 1985 the box office belonged to hard men like Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Chuck Norris, all gunpowder and gritted teeth.
Then here came a Black kid from New York, barely out of his teens, playing a hero who was sweet instead of vengeful, and glowing.
The Last Dragon climbed to number two at the box office and pulled in more than twenty-five million dollars. Tri-Star marketed it almost entirely to Black audiences, and Black audiences took it in and never gave it back.
It handed a whole generation of Black kids a kung fu hero who looked like them, talked like them, and came up on the same kind of blocks. They learned him by heart.
People still quote the Sh**un of Harlem, and they still answer the movie's big question, who's the master, without missing a beat.
And then the thing that should have come next did not.
Motown laid a contract in front of Taimak, a multi-film deal, the kind that turns the star of one hit into a lasting movie star. There was talk of a sequel, another round, a whole franchise built on his face.
He would not sign it.
The way he has told it for years, it was never really about the dollars on the page. It was about how he was treated in the room, a cold reception, the sense of being made small and cut out of the very thing he had carried on his back.
So a young man barely past his teens, fresh off headlining a hit for one of the most powerful men in Black music, looked hard at that deal and walked away from it. He has said the relationship with Gordy never healed, that he felt betrayed, that the man who once took him in never worked with him again.
The lasting movie stardom that so many people expected for him, that he had pictured for himself, simply never arrived.
He kept working, just never on that scale again. Guest spots on television, the leading man in Janet Jackson's Let's Wait Awhile video, plays, commercials, and teaching martial arts to other people's children, one of them Robert De Niro's son.
Even in the eighties he had worried that Leroy Green would become a cage, that the sweet hero would be the only role anyone let him play, so he chased darker parts to show there was more in him. The big leads in big movies, the ones his talent pointed straight at, kept landing in other men's hands.
Some of that was the deal he refused to sign. Some of it was older and uglier than any one contract, the same wall a lot of gifted Black actors ran into in those years, when the men running Hollywood looked right at a leading man and somehow could not see one.
Here is what he did not do.
He did not let it turn him bitter.
He opened a gym in Manhattan and wrote his own memoir. He kept earning black belts, and he gave years to teaching martial arts to kids in neighborhoods most people had already written off.
Asked later about the sequel he gave up, Taimak said it plainly. It was not so much about what was in the contract, he told a reporter, it was about how he was getting treated, and it is not always what it's cracked up to be.
The stardom never materialized, he said, and he holds no grudges over it. It was a different lifetime and a different man, and he is a trained actor now.
What he keeps coming back to is simpler than any career. If you wind up in a room full of dollar bills with nobody there to love you, he asked, then what was the whole thing worth.
Forty years on, the little movie that nobody at the studio fully believed in is still running. It earned a fortieth-anniversary re-release and a new home on streaming, and it keeps finding kids who memorize every line.
And Taimak is still on a set. Right now he is making a new martial arts film built around Black fighters at an HBCU, acting in it and helping produce it, past sixty and still throwing real strikes for a camera.
He turns sixty-two today, the same man who once packed a gi for an audition because fighting was the truest thing he knew about himself.
I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter. If you'd like to support the work, here's the link:
https://buymeacoffee.com/blackhistoryarchives
Every coffee helps me keep creating.
