‘Squid Game’ Star Lee Jung-jae on Changing From ‘Naive’ and ‘Childish’ Player 456 for Season 2: ‘It Was More Fun to Act the Season 1 Gi-hun’
It’s been more than three years since audiences saw Lee Jung-jae’s gambling addict Seong Gi-hun jump into his Player 456 uniform to compete in the deadly, childish games at the center of Netflix’s Korean drama “Squid Game.” Now that the Emmy-winning smash hit show returns for Season 2 on Dec. 26, viewers might not recognize Lee when he suits up as Gi-hun again — but that’s not because of the lengthy wait between installments.
This season, Gi-hun is no longer his fun-loving, optimistic self, which is pretty understandable for someone who was the sole survivor of a battle royale. He walked away with 45.6 billion won — but it was all blood money.
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Given that “Squid Game” creator and director Hwang Dong-hyuk didn’t conclude Season 1 with any plans to make a second (which has led to a third and final) season, it was not a role Lee initially had to worry about reprising.
Then the viewership spiked, the Emmys rolled in and Netflix begged Hwang for more. So he got to work on figuring out how best to bring back “Squid Game.” Season 2 finds Gi-hun once again in the games, this time secretly trying to take down the people behind the twisted event.
“We had many conversations about why he has become who he is now. However, to some extent, JJ [Lee Jung-jae] was already aware of what kind of character Gi-hun would be in Season 2,” Hwang says. “From the end of Season 1, after the games and after he had won the huge cash prize, he left the game, but couldn’t help his mother, because the mother had passed away. So JJ was already aware of where we wanted to meet Gi-hun at the beginning of Season 2 due to all of those experiences.”
For Hwang, it was less about preparing Lee for where Gi-hun was at mentally and more about working with Lee to find pieces of the old Gi-hun they could incorporate in an organic way in Seasons 2 and 3 to please the “Squid Game” audience.
“The thing we focused a lot more on and invested conversations and time into was how, in Season 1, a lot of what the people loved about Gi-hun was he was this kind of naive, at times childish and playful and at times immature kind of character,” says Hwang. “And he had held this warmth and goodness of heart, and that was what a lot of people loved about this character. But now you meet him at a point where he is a lot more focused and almost completely dominated or consumed by his drive to achieve what he has set out to do.”
In Seasons 2 and 3, it was harder to find “that side of Gi-hun that people loved so much before,” says Hwang. “So how to get a glimpse of his old self that people loved so much with any chance we had — that was something that he and I discussed a lot about, and also something that I kept in mind from when I was writing the script as well, because even though he is a lot more serious and focused character, I still wanted to give a glimpse into his old self, that familiar, almost childlike self that people love so much.”
Hwang wrote Seasons 2 and 3 back-to-back, and the episodes were filmed in Korea beginning in 2023, with Hwang ensuring the second season wrapped before they moved on to Season 3 so Lee could best maintain the state Gi-hun would be in mentally throughout the end of the series. “It was very interesting for me as an actor to live as Gi-hun for almost a year,” Lee says.
That time was a difficult one for Lee, who had to rebuild his character into an unrecognizable man, one whose goals and instincts have been forever changed by his time spent in the first games and the lives he lost around him at that time.
“I did feel a bit of a pressure, but not only in a stressful way. I just had a lot of introspections and what to focus on going into Season 2,” Lee says. “For example, how can I make the games more entertaining? Or because Gi-hun has been through so much change, how should I portray his evolved feelings and his transformation? As I had more introspections and deeper introspections about my character in this story, that really helps me as an actor in portraying my character, so I was able to really pull it off.”
In Season 2, Gi-hun re-enters the games in hopes of taking them down, but when he meets a new set of deeply debt-ridden players, he finds it difficult to explain to all of them why the promised prize money is not worth risking their lives for.
“It’s true that it was more fun to act the Season 1 Gi-hun, because he’s more of a fun character, and he’s very expressive about his emotion,” Lee explains. “But in Season 2, I had to check out all the circumstances that the characters were in. I was trying my best to save lives, and I also had to persuade people who weren’t on my side. I was a character who had to embrace the backstories and traumas of all the different players in the game. While it was fun for me to try out this new character, because he’s a more serious and hardened character, it was a challenge for me.”
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