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Rayna Vallandingham was announced as Street Fighter’s Juli in the upcoming 2026 movie. She is best known for both elite martial arts competition and film acting. At just 22 years old, she’s already accumulated taekwondo credentials that most athletes spend lifetimes chasing, then pivoted toward Hollywood at an age when most people are still figuring out what they want to do.
Who Is Rayna Vallandingham?
The foundation for Vallandingham’s career was laid remarkably early. She began training in taekwondo at age two, encouraged by her grandfather in her local dojo. Her father is of Dutch origin and her mother is of Indian descent, and the family clearly prioritized her athletic development from the start. By age six, she earned her first black belt. Two years later, at eight years old, she accomplished what most martial artists never do: she won her first world championship title at the American Taekwondo Association World Championships in 2011.
Taekwondo
What distinguished Vallandingham’s rise was the breadth of her dominance. She claimed titles across traditional forms, weapons categories (bo staff and nunchaku), sparring, and creative weapons competitions. Her victories in that 2011 championship constituted a Triple Crown achievement, something few black belts ever accomplish, let alone at her age. By her early twenties, she accumulated 13 American Taekwondo Association world titles and achieved a fourth-degree black belt ranking.
Vallandingham spends roughly two hours per day practicing martial arts, supplemented by multiple strength training sessions. She became the youngest competitor to perform in the 12-14 age group on ESPN, performing in front of thousands of viewers.
Acting
Her transition to acting happened with the same intensity. At age ten, immediately after winning a world championship in Arkansas, she flew to Los Angeles to debut in the film Underdog Kids, directed by Phillip Rhee, where she played Leticia Hernandez. Rather than treating acting as an alternative career, she developed it alongside her martial arts foundation.
Between that 2015 debut and her breakthrough role, Vallandingham auditioned for twelve years before landing her major opportunity. During those years of rejection, she didn’t abandon martial arts. Instead, she built a social media presence that grew from 7,000 followers to over one million, eventually reaching 3.2 million followers on TikTok alone. Her content merged martial arts with fashion and makeup tutorials, filling a niche that relatively few creators occupied. She appeared in music videos, including the 2018 Shawn Mendes track “Youth” featuring Khalid.
Her breakthrough came on her twentieth birthday when she received the call for Netflix’s Cobra Kai Season 6. The role of Zara Malik placed her as a skilled martial artist and social media influencer competing within the Iron Dragons dojo. Filming demanded consecutive twelve-hour days of pure action work, including wire work, weapon choreography, and emotional scenes between physical sequences. She performed many of her own stunts rather than relying on stunt doubles, bringing the same skill to television that won her thirteen world titles.
Juli
At The Game Awards 2025, held December 11, she was revealed as part of the cast for the upcoming Street Fighter live-action adaptation. She plays Juli, one of M. Bison’s trained assassins and members of a brainwashed unit called the Dolls in the source material.
In the video games, Juli appears as a teenage fighter with exceptional acrobatic and martial arts training, having been kidnapped and enhanced with genetic material from other characters. She’s depicted as highly mobile, with extensive assassination training and combat capabilities that place her among the most capable Dolls under Bison’s control.
The Street Fighter Movie
The Street Fighter movie itself represents Legendary Entertainment and Paramount Pictures’ attempt to adapt the classic Capcom fighting game franchise for the screen. Directed by Kitao Sakurai and set in 1993, the film reunites estranged fighters Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken Masters (Noah Centineo) when the mysterious Chun-Li (Callina Liang) recruits them for the World Warrior Tournament. The story involves a deadly conspiracy forcing them to confront their past. The ensemble cast includes Roman Reigns as Akuma, Jason Momoa as Blanka, 50 Cent as Balrog, Orville Peck as Vega, and Mel Jarnson as Cammy, among others. The film releases October 16, 2026.
Vallandingham’s casting as Juli makes sense. The role requires authentic martial arts capability rather than choreography learned on set. Her background in weapons training, acrobatic technique, and competition experience under pressure provide the foundation to portray a character whose fighting abilities define her character.
She’s simultaneously a legitimate taekwondo world champion athlete and a professional performer, making her one of the few people equipped to convincingly portray characters whose fictional skills match her actual capabilities.
