They told him no one would watch. In 2009, director Hwang Dong-hyuk tried writing what would become Squid Game as a feature film. It was a time of global financial crisis. Hwang himself was in debt, as were his mother and grandmother. But for all his efforts, he couldn’t secure financing for a movie about hundreds of desperate individuals competing to the death in children’s games for a large cash prize. “People were telling me that it’s too unrealistic,” Hwang says. It was too absurd, they said—and far too violent—so he put his script away. A decade passed, during which Hwang directed three acclaimed films: The Crucible, Miss Granny, and The Fortress. But he didn’t forget Squid Game, and in 2018, he found himself revisiting the old script. “It was a very strange experience,” he says, “because what seemed so unrealistic at the time didn’t feel as unrealistic anymore.”
By then, inequality was rising worldwide, a hate-propagating former reality show host had become president of the U.S., and Hwang’s story of disastrously indebted Korean residents vying for $38 million in an elaborate, ruthless game orchestrated by plutocrats no longer sounded so far-fetched. Hwang showed the script to Netflix, which had recently opened a division in Asia, and they agreed. It was an astute bet. The film was expanded into a series, and within 10 days of its release, the Korean television drama was the most watched Netflix show in 90 countries. In nations as different as the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia, people have competed in large-scale, real-life versions of Squid Game—without the part about fighting to the death. And the highly violent dystopian thriller isn’t just a commercial hit. Squid Game is the first series in a language other than English to receive Screen Actors Guild Awards, including for two of the central stars, Lee Jung-jae and Hoyeon.
I’ve often joked that I turn to Korean shows and films when I’m trying to feel less dead inside, except that it might not be much of a joke: It could just be that I’m reviving myself with potent medicine I require. When I watch Korean productions, I am more likely to weep, yell, rejoice, mourn, and laugh. But even for a Korean drama, Squid Game is shot through with high emotion. I watched the nine-episode series over the course of 24 hours, pausing only for pesky tasks like work and sleep. I forgot to eat. At times, I forgot to breathe.
THE GAMBLER Lee Jung-jae’s journey as Gi-hun begins with a disastrous trip to the racetrack.
Coat and pants by Alexander McQueen; shirt by Gucci; boots by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello; ring by David Yurman.PHOTOGRAPHS BY AB+DM; STYLED BY DEBORAH AFSHANI.
Emotional upheaval has always been central to Hwang’s vision. The series begins with its protagonist, Gi-hun, heading to a horse track to place some bets, and what ensues is a sequence of ill-considered decisions and heart-gripping crises. (Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen the first season.) Hwang is fascinated by the idea of gambling, because when people gamble, their façades fall away and they’re left with “very pure emotions, whether it be despair, anger, or joy.” He knows the series is “at a very extreme end of the spectrum” when it comes to showcasing raw feelings. That’s precisely what he wanted to explore.
Almost everybody recruited for the bloody, terrifying arenas of Squid Game elects to compete for the cash because they’re desperate. The three main characters, for instance, are in utter distress: There’s Gi-hun, the obsessive gambler and former autoworker, who’s heavily in debt and unable to pay for the urgent medical care his mother needs. There’s his childhood best friend, the ambitious Sang-woo, who stole money from clients, invested it, then lost it and is now on the run from the law. And there’s Sae-byeok, a North Korean defector who needs money to reunite with her family.
Hoyeon, the model and actor who plays Sae-byeok, won that SAG Award for what is, remarkably, her first acting role. She tells me that Hwang focused on the smallest nuances of her performance, even down to the level of individual syllables in the dialogue. The director would often give revised scripts to the cast the day before shooting. He’d apologize for the timing—and quantity—of his changes, but Hoyeon says the actors were grateful to him: “It was proof that the director was really just incessantly wrestling with the best way to portray these characters.” Asked for an example of a key last-minute change, Park Hae-soo, who plays the embezzling, treacherous Sang-woo, remembers a pivotal moment when, as his character is dying, he stretches his hand toward his former best friend, Gi-hun. “That wasn’t in the script,” says Park. “It was a late adjustment, and I believe the director made that change because he wanted the character to show a glimpse of something human inside himself.”
Lee, who plays the gambling addict Gi-hun, says the cast and crew developed a great deal of trust in one another: “It was a very special group of people to work with. And I say that as someone who has been on many, many sets before.” (Lee has been one of the most celebrated actors in Korea for 30 years, and his SAG Award is the latest in a long string of honors.) “Yeah, and I think another key to our teamwork would be drinking together a lot,” Hoyeon adds, laughing. Lee has said that Gi-hun might be the most difficult role he’s inhabited. The character is complicated and ever-shifting. He starts out as a kind of “fool,” as director Hwang puts it. In time, he changes, but Lee says that an abiding and essential part of Gi-hun’s character is his anger at injustice. The actor thought in depth about how to portray that “over and over” with different levels of rage, as Gi-hun is provoked by a variety of atrocities.