‘Squid Game’ Returns With A Vengeance: Creator Hwang Dong-Hyuk & Star Lee Jung-Jae Reveal Why
Squid Game is back with more blood and a taste for revenge.
Netflix’s biggest ever series, which launched in September 2021, returns for its second season later this month and it’s just as dystopian, violent and vicious as the first with more than 450 new characters to kill off.
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The first season, which scored 14 Emmy nominations including wins for star Lee Jung-jae and creator Hwang Dong-Hyuk for directing, was inspired by the Korean financial collapse.
The world, according to Dong-Hyuk, otherwise known as Director Hwang, is just as screwed up as it previously was, inspiring him to go back to the island for another round of Squid Game.
The second season starts with Seong Gi-hun, otherwise known as Player 456, played by Lee, searching for the people behind the game, three years after winning it. He’s using the ?45.6 billion prize to fund this search, helped by a large group of ne’er-do-wells and underworld figures, from the safety of a disused motel that he’s turned into his HQ fortress.
Gi-hun is initially searching for The Recruiter, played by Gong Yoo, a slender figure in a sharp suit that lured people into the game by playing ddakji in the subway.
This all leads Gi-hun to returning to Squid Game in order to attempt to end it. Once he’s back inside, he is introduced to a new cast of characters including Myung-gi (played by Yim Si-Wan), a former cryptocurrency influencer who, after losing a hefty sum of cash and incurring huge losses for himself and his subscribers, becomes a fugitive until his involvement in the game; Jun-hee (played by Jo Yu-Ri), a strong-willed woman who participates in the game due to bad investments made at the advice of said influencer; Yong-sik (played by Yang Dong-Geun), a compulsive gambler neck-deep in debt who finds his own mother is a participant in the game; his mother Geum-ja (played by Kang Ae-Sim) and Jung-bae (played by Lee Seo-Hwan), a longtime friend and former coworker of Gi-Hun’s who was seen in Season 1 gambling alongside him at the horse race track.
Elsewhere, Lee Byung-hun’s The Front Man, who has seemingly taken charge of the game following the death of Oh Il-nam, and Hwang Jun-ho, played by Wi Ha-jun, a detective who sneaks into the game in search of his brother, are also back.
Gi-Hun has grown in the three years since his first visit. Lee Jung-jae explains that his character has gone through a “transitional period.” “Because of that emotional change in Season 1, the types of emotions that he feels when he meets the other players is very different from what he feels when he meets other participants in Season 2,” he said. “In Season 2, I realized that I was on set receiving and accepting others’ emotions first, and paying more attention to that, so I thought that was the biggest difference.”
Director Hwang says that the second season has “greater scale” than Season 1 and there are obviously new games. Without revealing the specifics of the new and deadly challenges, he said that he thought long and hard about which games to make the contestants plays. He revealed there were plenty of suggestions online about local Korean games but he wanted them to be “really simple.”
“The games are one of the biggest changes as well as the characters because, except for Gi-Hun, all of the characters that play the games are new so you’re going to be able to see more endearing characters that you end up rooting for,” he added.
Hwang said while the engine of the story is Gi-Hun’s quest for revenge on the perpetrators, there’s a much bigger message in Season 2.
“Do we have the willpower and strength to try to make the world a better place? Does humanity have what it takes to change the course of the world, and can we truly let go of our greed, our desires in order to create a better world together? Those were some of the questions that I wanted to pose, not so much about who or how these people behind the games like what they’re like,” he said.
The drama series remains somewhat political. “The one thing that I had most in mind was this current world and how it makes all of us divided, it separates us from the other group, creates different sides to become hostile,” he said, speaking days before Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency for a second time. “There are so many things that divide us today, whether it’s race, religion, language, the haves and the have nots, the generational divisions, and recently, with the very important vote that you have this week, we look at the political division, the left against the right, the conservatives against the progressives, and things like this lead to such a division where it almost seems like there is this line that absolutely cannot be crossed. It seems that the world leaders are creating these walls and divisions and it leads us to think that everyone who is on the other side, who does not think as you do, is an enemy that cannot ever be forgiven.”
Highlighting this in Season 2 is another one of the biggest differences between the seasons: voting. The contestants in this latest round of murderous children’s games are handed a vote after each challenge to decide whether they want to continue or to carry on and accrue more money.
“Even more so than the tension that comes from the games themselves, I felt more intense feelings of suspense and tension from these votes, because you cannot but wonder what’s going to happen if the games are going to go on, who’s going to vote,” Hwang said. “That leads to the people in the games thinking whatever [is chosen], I’m right, you’re wrong. I’m an angel. You’re absolute evil. All throughout Season 2, I was focusing on that issue of, is there truly hope for us?”
He said that he created Season 2 because he does not want to live in a divided society. You can’t put a price on human life, either, he added.
“I am not so naive that I believe that we can do completely away with any kind of discrimination in this world that we live in,” Hwang said. “However, I don’t believe people are different. There are differences in terms of what kind of talents we have, what we are capable of. People have different abilities. However, I think it truly it becomes a problem when those differences lead to discrimination to an unacceptable level where those that have less abilities, or those that have abilities that are deemed of less value in society, are driven to the rock bottom of society without any kind of system to look after them. That is something that we have to stop. If we fail to do that, I don’t think that we will ever see a society with a healthy social system. We need to move in a way where we accept the differences of individuals, but make sure that it does not lead to discrimination. Unfortunately, I think that is what the world is currently doing.”
Season 2 of Squid Game premieres on Netflix on December 26. It will be followed next year by the third and final season.
DEADLINE: Director Hwang, you’ve said that Season 1 of Squid Game was quite stressful. How did you both feel going into Season 2?
HWANG: Season 1, as you know, was an immense success, and thanks to that success we could create a Season 2, but we knew that there was so much expectation and anticipation for Season 2, so it did come to me as a bit of pressure. I wanted to channel that pressure into a positive way forward, so the season one finale was [Seong] Gi-hun not getting on the flight, saying that he’ll find the guys [responsible]. I knew that I had to do something with that and finish the story of Gi-hun, so that’s how I went on with Season 2.
I’ve been working on this project like almost like 10 years from the writing. Finally, we are at the point of launching and it makes me excited, for sure, also at the same time, I’m nervous, because people love Season 1 so much.
LEE: When we were filming Season 1, I kept asking Director Hwang if we were going to have a Season 2. And he said, “Never, ever.” But because we got so much love and support from the global fans, I think it was our way of returning that love to the fans by creating a Season 2, so I was very happy to return and reprise my role as Gi-hun. I did feel a bit of a pressure, but I also, just like Director Hwang, wanted to use that as a positive driver.
Season 2, in a way, feels like a way of returning the love to the fans. It’s my first time feeling this way in my career. But it doesn’t feel like a product or content, it feels like a gift or present we’re giving to their viewers, which makes me even more nervous, because we don’t know if they will like the present or not.
DEADLINE: Season 1 was influenced by the South Korean financial crisis. What was your inspiration for Season 2?
HWANG: Season 1 came out during the pandemic, and it’s been about three or four years, and now, if you see the world and the environment that we live in, I think it’s spiraling downwards. It’s not getting any better. We still see gaps between gender and the poor exacerbating and we see wars around the globe, and we have conflicts between races, religion, class. Looking at all that, and I also feel like the young people just want a jackpot because they don’t have that ladder they can climb up, they don’t have that anymore. I think because these things are still happening in our world, I could be influenced by that, and I could create a Season 2.
DEADLINE: JJ, your character is slightly more mature in Season 2, you’ve gone through Squid Game and come out successful. Did you approach the character differently in Season 2, knowing what you knew?
LEE: This time around, Gi-hun is full of vengeance, and he wants to put an end to the game. I’m kind of sad that he no longer is the naive and childlike person that he was in Season 1, just quite lovable. But this time around, he has a very strong purpose, and a thing that he wants to make happen. As an actor, sometimes when my character has that strong purpose, I think I’m empowered by that, so I was very happy filming Season 2.
DEADLINE: Director Hwang, you wrote Season 1 largely by yourself. Did you have other writers for Season 2 and did you film in the same locations?
HWANG: When I was writing the scripts for Season 2, I did have a couple of assistant writers help me, but usually they were doing most of the research, and the main writing was done by myself. For the locations, about 80% of the entire filming for Squid Game takes place on a set or a sound stage, so we used the same soundstage for Season 2, and for the scenes that do not require to be on set, we found locations that were suitable for the scenes.
DEADLINE: Hwang In-ho, The Front Man, is much more of a major character now following the death of Oh Il-nam. Do we find out more about how he became in charge of Squid Game?
HWANG: This might be a bit of a spoiler, so I can’t give too much away, but I can tell you that throughout seasons two and three, you will find parts of his backstory.
DEADLINE: You decided to focus on the guards a little more in Season 2. Why did you decide to do that?
HWANG: In Season 1, I used the cop who infiltrated the game, Hwang Jun-ho, as a way to introduce the life of the workers there. But in Season 2, I wanted to focus more on the soldiers and the managers with the triangle or the square. This time around, you can see a sneak peek into the lives of the soldiers and managers and how they came to be who they are.
DEADLINE: JJ, since Squid Game launched you became a Jedi Master in The Acolyte. Did that Star Wars series have any influence on how you approached returning to Squid Game?
LEE: Being in production for The Acolyte, was indeed a very special experience and a memory that I’m very fond of, but I think that project is very different from Squid Game. Instead of using the experience from The Acolyte, I relied more on my experience of filming Season 1 of Squid Game. I tried my best to connect what I learned from Season 1 and then use that in Season 2.
DEADLINE: Season 2 of Squid Game is seven episodes, compared to nine in Season 1. Was that your decision? Did you film Season 2 back-to-back with Season 3?
HWANG: I wrote seasons two and three at the same time, and we were in production for both simultaneously, and currently we are in the post-production process for Season 3. When I was writing the script for the two seasons, I felt like there was a big turning point or an inflection point, and that was the end of episode seven, so I thought that it would do it justice to have a separate season after that. That’s why I had first seven episodes as Season 2 and then the rest of Season 3.
DEADLINE: We reported that David Fincher is working on an American version of Squid Game. How does that make you feel? Could we potentially see other international versions of the show, as the VIPs allude to Squid Games taking place all over the world?
HWANG: It’s been about a year or two talking about David Fincher coming into the story. But I don’t know anything official about that, but why not, he’s David Fincher, I respect his work. I like his films so if he does, I’m excited and I’ll look forward to it.
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