Squid Game is a South Korean survival drama television series created by Hwang Dong-hyuk for Netflix. Its cast includes Lee Jung-jae, Park Hae-soo, Wi Ha-joon, HoYeon Jung, O Yeong-su, Heo Sung-tae, Anupam Tripathi and Kim Joo-ryoung.
The series revolves around a secret contest where 456 players, all of whom are in deep financial hardship, risk their lives to play a series of deadly children's games for the chance to win a ₩45.6 billion prize. The series' title draws from a similarly named Korean children's game. Hwang conceived the idea based on his own economic struggles, as well as the class disparity in South Korea and capitalism. Though he wrote the story in 2009, Hwang couldn't find a production company to fund the idea until Netflix took an interest around 2019 as part of a drive to expand their foreign programming offerings.
Squid Game was released worldwide on September 17, 2021 to critical acclaim and international attention. It became Netflix's most-watched series and the most-watched program in 94 countries, attracting more than 142 million member households and 1.65 billion viewing hours in its first four weeks, surpassing Bridgerton as the service's most-watched show.
It has also received numerous accolades, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Series, Miniseries or Television Film for O Yeong-su, and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series and Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series for Lee Jung-jae and HoYeon Jung, respectively; all three were also the first Korean actors to win in those categories. The first series received 14 Primetime Emmy Award nominations, including for Outstanding Drama Series, making it the first non-English-language work to be nominated in this category; Lee won the Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama series, the first time an Asian actor won the award for a non-English part.
Seong Gi-hun, a divorced father and indebted gambler who lives with his elderly mother, is invited to play a series of children's games for a chance at a large cash prize. Accepting the offer, he is taken to an unknown location where he finds himself among 455 other players who are all in deep financial trouble. The players are made to wear green tracksuits and are kept under watch at all times by masked guards in pink jumpsuits, with the games overseen by the Front Man, who wears a black mask and black uniform. The players soon discover that losing a game results in their deaths, with each death adding ₩100 million to the potential ₩45.6 billion grand prize. Gi-hun allies with other players, including his childhood friend Cho Sang-woo and North Korean defector Kang Sae-byeok, to try to survive the games' physical and psychological twists.
Numbers in parentheses denote the character's assigned player number in the Squid Game universe.
Lee Jung-jae as Seong Gi-hun [sʌŋ gi hun] (listen), 456), a divorced chauffeur and gambling addict. He lives with his mother and struggles to support his daughter financially. He participates in the game to settle his many debts, and to prove himself financially stable enough to have custody of his daughter, who is to leave for the United States with her mother and stepfather. (seasons 1–2)
Park Hae-soo as Cho Sang-woo (조상우, Korean pronunciation: [tɕo saŋ u], 218[c]), the former head of an investment team at a securities company. He was a junior classmate to Gi-hun, and studied at Seoul National University. He joins the game to escape the police, who wants him for stealing money from his clients and racking up massive debts from bad investments. (season 1)
Wi Ha-joon as Hwang Jun-ho , Korean pronunciation: [hwaːŋ tɕun ho]), a police officer who sneaks into the game disguised as a guard, to find his missing brother. (seasons 1–2)
Jung Ho-yeon as Kang Sae-byeok , Korean pronunciation: [gaŋ sɛ bjʌk], 067), a North Korean defector from North Hamgyong Province, North Korea.[10] She enters the game to pay for a broker who can rescue her parents across the border, and to buy a house for her reunited family. (season 1)
O Yeong-su as Oh Il-nam (오일남, Korean pronunciation: [o il nam], 001), an elderly man with a brain tumor who prefers playing the game as opposed to waiting to die in the outside world. (season 1)
Heo Sung-tae as Jang Deok-su (장덕수, Korean pronunciation: [dzaŋ dʌk su], 101), a gangster who enters the game to settle his massive gambling debts, including money he stole from his boss and underlings. A migrant worker from Pakistan, who enters the game to provide for his young family after his employer withholds his wages for months. (season 1)
Kim Joo-ryoung as Han Mi-nyeo (한미녀, Korean pronunciation: [han mi njʌ], 212), a loud and manipulative woman. Her reasons for entering the game are unexplained. (season 1).
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Yoo Sung-joo as Byeong-gi (병기, 111), a doctor who secretly works with a group of corrupt guards to traffic the organs of dead participants in exchange for information on upcoming games
Lee Yoo-mi as Ji-yeong (지영, 240), a young woman who has just been released from prison after killing her abusive step-father
Kim Si-hyun as Player 244, a pastor who rediscovers his faith during the game
Lee Sang-hee as Do Jung-soo (도정수, 017), a former glassmaker
Kim Yun-tae as Player 069, a player who joins the game with his wife, Player 070
Lee Ji-ha as Player 070, a player who joins the game with her husband, Player 069
Kwak Ja-hyoung as Player 278, a player who joins Deok-su's group and acts as his henchman
Christian Lagahit as Player 276, a player who joins Seong Gi-hun's group in the Tug of War round
Kim Young-ok as Oh Mal-soon, Gi-hun's mother
Cho Ah-in as Seong Ga-yeong, Gi-hun's daughter
Kang Mal-geum as Kang Eun-ji, Gi-hun's ex-wife and Ga-yeong's mother
Park Hye-jin as Sang-woo's mother
Park Si-wan as Kang Cheol, Sae-byeok's younger brother
Around 2008, Hwang Dong-hyuk had tried unsuccessfully to get investment for a different movie script that he had written, and he, his mother, and his grandmother had to take out loans to stay afloat, but still struggled amid the debt crisis within the country. He spent his free time in a Manhwabang (South Korean manga cafe) reading Japanese survival manga such as Battle Royale, Liar Game and Gambling Apocalypse: Kaiji. Hwang compared the characters' situation in these works to his own current situation and considered the idea of being able to join such a survival game to win money to get him out of debt, leading him to write a film script on that concept throughout 2009. Hwang stated, "I wanted to write a story that was an allegory or fable about modern capitalist society, something that depicts an extreme competition, somewhat like the extreme competition of life. But I wanted it to use the kind of characters we've all met in real life. Hwang feared the storyline was "too difficult to understand and bizarre" at the time. Hwang tried to sell his story to various Korean production groups and actors, but had been told it was too grotesque and unrealistic. Hwang put this script aside without any takers, and over the next ten years successfully completed three other films, including the crime drama film Silenced (2011) and the historical drama film The Fortress (2017).
In the 2010s, Netflix had seen a large growth in viewership outside of North America, and started investing in productions in other regions, including Korea. Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, stated in 2018 that they were looking for more successes from overseas productions: "The exciting thing for me would be if the next Stranger Things came from outside America. Right now, historically, nothing of that scale has ever come from anywhere but Hollywood. Netflix had opened up a division in Asia in 2018, and while they were still operating out of temporary leased office space in Seoul, Hwang brought his script to their attention. Kim Minyoung, one of Netflix's content officers for the Asian regions, recognized Hwang's talent from The Fortress and his other films, and upon seeing his script for Squid Game, knew they needed it for the service. Kim said were looking for shows that were different from what's traditionally 'made it,' and Squid Game was exactly it". Netflix formally announced in September 2019 they would produce Hwang's work as an original series. Netflix's Bela Bajaria, head of global television operations, said that of their interest in Hwang's work, "we knew it was going to be big in Korea because it had a well-regarded director with a bold vision", and that "K-Dramas also travel well across Asia". Regarding his return to the project, Hwang commented, "It's a sad story. But the reason why I returned to the project is because the world 10 years from then has transformed to a place where these unbelievable survival stories are so fitting, and I found that this is the time when people will call these stories intriguing and realistic. Hwang further believed that the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the economic disparity between classes in South Korea, and said that "All of these points made the story very realistic for people compared to a decade ago".
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With the Netflix order, the film concept was expanded out to a nine-episode series. Kim stated that there was "so much more than what was written in the 120-minute format. So we worked together to turn it into a series. Hwang said he was able to expand the script so that it "could focus on the relationships between people the stories that each of the people had". Initially, Netflix had named the series Round Six, rather than Squid Game as Hwang had suggested; according to Netflix's vice president for content in Asia Kim Minyoung, while they knew that the name "squid game" would be familiar to Korean viewers from the children's game, it "wouldn't resonate because not many people would get it", and opted to use Round Six as it self-described the nature of the competition. As production continued, Hwang pushed on the service to use Squid Game instead; its cryptic name and unique visuals helped to draw in curious viewers, according to Kim. At the time that Hwang wrote the series, his goal was for having the series reach the most-watched show in Netflix in the United States for at least one day. Hwang had initially written the series as eight episodes, which was comparable to other Netflix shows, but found that the material for the last episode was longer than he planned, so it was split into two.
Hwang described the work as "a story about losers". The names of the characters – Seong Gi-hun, Cho Sang-woo, and Il-nam – were all based on Hwang's childhood friends, as well as the character name Hwang Jun-ho, who was also a childhood friend in real life with an older brother named Hwang In-ho. The two main characters Gi-hun and Sang-woo were based on Hwang's own personal experiences and represented "two sides" of himself; Gi-hun shared the same aspects of being raised by an economically disadvantaged single mother in the Ssangmun district of Seoul, while Sang-woo reflected on Hwang having attended Seoul National University with high expectations from his family and neighborhood. Further, Gi-hun's background was inspired by the organizers of the SsangYong Motor labor strike of 2009 against mass layoffs.
Shapes punched into dalgona, a Korean sugar candy treat, based on the shapes used in the second game of the show. Within the show, players had to extract the inner shapes intact.
Hwang based the narrative on Korean games of his childhood to show the irony of a childhood game where competition was not important becoming an extreme competition with people's lives at stake. Additionally, as his initial script was intended for film, he opted to use children's games with simple rules that were easy to explain in contrast to other survival-type films using games with complex rules. The central game he selected, the squid game, was a popular Korean children's game from the 1970s and 1980s. Hwang recalled the squid game as "the most physically aggressive childhood game I played in neighborhood alleys as a kid, which is why I also loved it the most", and because of this "it's the most symbolic game that reflects today's competitive society, so I picked it out as the show's title". The colors of the ddakjis in the initial game, which are blue and red, were inspired from the Korean urban legend "blue paper, red paper". The "Red light, Green light" game was selected because of its potential to make a lot of losers in one go. Regarding the selection, Hwang said, "The game was selected because the scene filled with so many people randomly moving and stopping could be viewed as a ridiculous but a sad group dance. Hwang joked that the dalgona candy game they chose may influence sales of dalgona, similar to how sales of Korean gats (traditional hats) bloomed after the broadcast of Netflix's series Kingdom. Licking the candy to free the shape was something that Hwang said that he had done as a child and brought it into the script. Hwang had considered other Korean children's games such as Gonggi, Dong, Dong, Dongdaemun, and Why did you come to my house? a Korean variant of the Hana Ichi Monme).
Hwang wrote all of the series himself, taking nearly six months to write the first two episodes alone, after which he turned to friends to get input on moving forward. Hwang also addressed the challenges of preparing for the show which was physically and mentally exhausting, saying that he had forgone dental health while making Season 1 and had to have six teeth pulled by his dentist after production was complete. As such, Hwang was initially unsure about a sequel after completing these episodes, though he wrote the ending to keep a potential hook for a sequel in mind. Hwang had considered an alternate ending where Gi-hun would have boarded the plane after concluding his call with the game organizers to see his daughter, but Hwang said of that ending, "Is that the right way for us to really propose the question or the message that we wanted to convey through the series?
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Hwang said he chose to cast Lee Jung-jae as Gi-hun as to "destroy his charismatic image portrayed in his previous roles". HoYeon Jung was requested by her new management company to send a video to audition for the series while she was finishing a shoot in Mexico and preparing for New York Fashion Week. Although this was her first audition as an actor and her expectations were low, Hwang said, "The moment I saw her audition tape from New York, I immediately thought to myself, 'this is the girl we want.' My first impression of her was that she is wild and free like an untamed horse". On casting Anupam Tripathi as Ali Abdul, Hwang said, "It was hard to find good foreign actors in Korea." He chose Anupam Tripathi because of his emotional acting capabilities and fluency in Korean. Both Gong Yoo and Lee Byung Hun had worked with Hwang during his previous films, Silenced and The Fortress respectively, and Hwang had asked both to appear in small roles within Squid Game. The VIPs were selected from non-Korean actors living in Asia; in the case of Geoffrey Giuliano, who played the VIP that interacted with Jun-ho, his prior role from Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula led to his casting for Squid Game.
Production and filming of the series ran from June to October 2020, including a mandatory month-long break due to the COVID-19 pandemic. City scenes were filmed in Daejeon, while the island set pieces were filmed on Seongapdo located in Ongjin.
The shapes of Ojingo (Squid) played heavily in the graphic design of the show.
As Netflix was targeting the work for a global audience, the visuals were emphasized and some of the rules of the children's games were simplified to avoid potential issues with the language barrier. The colorful sets and costumes were designed to look like a fantasy world. The players and soldiers each wear a distinctive color, to reduce the sense of individuality and emphasize the difference between the two groups. The green tracksuits worn by the players were inspired by 1970s athletic wear, known as trainingbok. The maze-like corridors and stairs drew inspiration from the 4-dimensional stair drawings of M. C. Escher including Relativity. Production designer Chae Kyoung-sun said these seemingly infinite stairways represented "a form of bondage for the contestants". The complex network of tunnels between the arena, the dorm, and the administrative office was inspired by ant colonies.
Chae was also inspired by the Saemaul Undong political initiative of the 1970s aimed to modernize rural Korean villages. The mint green and pink color theme throughout the show were a common theme from Korean schools in the 1970s and 1980s. Green-suited characters develop associations of fear with pink through its use in guard outfits and the stairway room.
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The players' dormitory was envisioned with the concept of "people who are abandoned on the road" according to Chae; this was also used in the tug-of-war game. The room was designed using white tiles and the curved opening like a vehicular tunnel. The bed and stairs initially were laid out to look like warehouse shelves, but as the episodes progressed and these furnishing used as makeshift defenses, they took the appearance of broken ladders and stairs, implying the way these players were trapped with no way out, according to Chae. The dinner scene that took place in the eighth episode was inspired by the art installation The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago. Walls of many of the areas where the games took place were painted in skies inspired by The Empire of Light series by René Magritte.
The crew spent the most time crafting the set for the Marbles game, creating a mix of realism and fakeness as to mirror the life and death nature of the games themselves. Chae stated that this set was designed as a combination of small theatrical stages, each stage representing parts of Player 001's memories. The VIP room was one of the last pieces to be designed, and Chae said that they decided on an animal-based theme for both the costumes and room for this; "The VIPs are the kind of people who take other people's lives for entertainment and treat them like game pieces on a chessboard, so I wanted to create a powerful and instinctive look for the room.
Most sets were a combination of practical sets and chroma key backgrounds. For example, in the Glass Stepping Stones scenes, the set, designed as if in a circus tent for the players performing for the VIPs, was only 1.5 metres off the ground, using chroma key screens to simulate the height in post-production. In filming, this was far enough from the ground to make the actors nervous, which contributed to the scene. The tug-of-war set was actually set more than 10 metres off the ground, which further created anxiety for some of the actors with fears of heights.
The robot doll in the first episode, "Red Light, Green Light", was inspired by Younghee, a character who appeared on the covers of Korean textbooks Chul-soo and Young-hee in the 1970s and 1980s, and her hairstyle was inspired by Hwang's daughter's. The doll singsongs, in Korean, "Mugunghwa flower has blossomed", referring to the hibiscus syriacus, the national flower of South Korea. The use of this familiar character was meant to juxtapose memories of childhood and unsettling fear in the players, according to Chae. Similarly, the set for the dalgona game, using giant pieces of playground equipment, were to evoke players' memories of their childhood, and was a common place where Korean children would have played dalgona with friends. The dalgona used in "The Man with the Umbrella" were made by a street vendor from Daehangno.
The Korean and English language title logos incorporated the circle, triangle and square shapes into their design.
Throughout the series, the trio of circle, triangle, and square shapes appear frequently on the cards given to recruit players, on the guards' masks, and inside the show's title. These are shapes associated with the playing field for the children's game of Squid (Ojing-eo). They are also used to represent the hierarchy of the guards within the complex. Following from the comparison with an ant colony, the guards with circles are considered the workers, triangles as the soldiers, and squares as the managers (see also: Korean honorifics). Further, in the Korean alphabet, Hangul, the circle represents the romanized letter "O", the triangle represents part of the letter "J", and the square represents the letter "M"; together, "OJM" are the romanized initials of Ojing-eo Geim, the Korean translation of Squid Game.
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Jung Jae-il composed the score for the series.
Music
See also: Squid Game (soundtrack)
Jung Jae-il, who previously composed the soundtrack for Parasite, composed and directed Squid Game's score. To prevent it from becoming boring, he asked the help of composers Park Min-ju, and Kim Sung-soo, a music director for musicals who uses the stage name "23" as a composer.
Two classical music pieces are also used throughout the show as part of the players' routine: the third movement of Joseph Haydn's "Trumpet Concerto" is used to wake the players, and Johann Strauss II's "The Blue Danube" is used to indicate the start of a new game. Ludwig van Beethoven's "Fifth Symphony" is also heard in the VIP lounge. A cover of "Fly Me to the Moon", arranged by Jung and sung by Korean artist Joo Won Shin, was used over the "Red Light, Green Light" game of the first episode; according to Joo, Hwang wanted a contrast between the brutal killing of the players and the "romantic and beautiful lyrics and melody" of the song, such that the scene "embodies the increasingly polarized capitalist society that we live in today in a very compressed and cynical way".
For the song "Way Back Then" that accompanies children playing Squid Game, Jung wanted to use instruments that he practiced in elementary school, such as recorders and castanets. The rhythm of the song is based on a 3-3-7 clapping rhythm that is commonly used in South Korea to cheer someone on. The recorder, played by Jung himself, had a slight "beep", which was unintentional. The song "Round VI" was played by the Budapest Scoring Orchestra.
