I created Squid Game — now I'm like one of the show's wealthy VIPs

Times

5 hours ago

Squid Game, the South Korean series about a contest featuring deadly versions of children's games, satirises lots of things — reality TV, authoritarianism, democracy, surveillance, cultural infantilisation.
Above all, though, it's capitalism that gets a kicking. In pursuit of a multi-million pound prize the debt-ridden contestants risk their lives — and condemn each other to grisly doom — while an audience of wealthy 'VIPs' watch the bloodbath on plush sofas, sipping wine.
So there's a juicy irony in the fact that I'm meeting Hwang Dong-hyuk, the creator of the series, in a wincingly posh hotel in central London. We wait in a corridor while members of his entourage issue requests to nervous staff. 'We can't start until he has his coffee,' someone says. Hot or cold? 'Bring both, just in case.' A waiter sprints off.
Refreshments delivered, Hwang appears, a contained figure in round glasses, safari jacket and slacks, flanked by Korean, American and British assistants. He's a big deal these days, given that Squid Game — about to start its third and final season — is Netflix's most-watched show worldwide.
The first season of 2021 was viewed for a total of 1.6 billion hours in the first 28 days of release and the following year it won six Emmys, with Hwang becoming the first South Korean to win outstanding directing for a drama series. That was for the Red Light, Green Light episode, featuring a twist on Grandma's Footsteps in which the losers were mown down by machine guns. 'I want to steal your brain,' Steven Spielberg told him when they met.
So has Hwang, 54, become a VIP himself? He gives a little laugh. 'I don't think I'm a VIP but I've become closer to the lives of the VIPs. I have experienced both sides, that's why I was able to tell a story like this,' he says, speaking through an interpreter, although he sometimes slips into very good English, a legacy from his time at the University of Southern California.
When he conceived Squid Game he was 'very much like' its everyman hero Seong Gi-hun, contestant 456, played by Lee Jung-jae. 'I was in debt — I had to worry about the money for the next day,' he says. He had grown up poor in Seoul — his father, a journalist, died when he was five and his mother did various jobs to support the family.
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'Now I have accumulated a certain amount of wealth [$20 million, according to one estimate] and some people might think I'm closer to the host in Squid Game now.' By whom he means the Front Man, the mask-wearing psychopath who runs the game, played by Lee Byung-hun. 'But I try to keep watch so that my economic success doesn't dominate what I do as a creator.' His output has not lacked social conscience — his breakthrough film was Silenced (2011), based on real-life events at Gwangju Inhwa School for the deaf in South Korea, where students were sexually assaulted by teachers.
As well as making him rich, the series — every episode of which Hwang wrote and directed — has taken a physical toll. 'I've lost eight or nine teeth,' he says. 'When I have stress, it causes gum disease. I am trying to get my body and mind away from Squid Game, but every time we are in a setting like this it feels like I'm being pulled back.' I think he means talking to annoying journalists, not swanky hotels. He sidesteps a question about his private life, but in 2021 said it was several years since he had been in a relationship.
Squid Game was inspired by Japanese manga survival stories such as Battle Royale and Liar Game and, he says, by the financial crisis of 2008, which 'affected everybody in every country and exposed the vulnerabilities of late capitalism. The series definitely touched something in the zeitgeist.' Mild spoilers ahead.
Hwang puts the show's popularity down to 'the contrast between the innocence of the kids' games and the brutal consequence of failure', whether that's crossing a glass bridge over a fatal drop where some panes break and others don't, or cutting a shape in honeycomb and getting shot if it breaks in the wrong place. The final season brings horrible new spins on skipping and hide and seek.
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How would Hwang fare in situations like those? 'I'm quite timid and scare easily,' he says. In the show Gi-hun licked his honeycomb to soften it. 'That was my trick that I used to do as a kid. I was really good at it. But if I were put under that much stress, I might mess it up.' Especially if the soundtrack was Cliff Richard's Congratulations, as it is in one game in the new season.
Hwang has said that Squid Game had to be made by a streamer because it is too violent for traditional TV networks. Season two was especially bloody, as Seong Gi-hun, who won the game in the first season, entered again and led a mutiny against the guards. Have we become inured to violence? 'Human beings have always been violent,' he says. 'At least nowadays people don't go into Africa, grab people from their homes and sell them as slaves. Now the brutality has become more nuanced.'
After each round the contestants vote on whether the game will continue, but the results are often swayed by yes voters intimidating the no camp. This feels like a swipe at Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and the like, but Hwang, mindful of US visa applications, is diplomatic. 'The system is what makes strongmen — they don't suddenly fall from the sky.'
The show is part of a 'Korean wave' of international cultural success that includes the K-pop of BTS and Blackpink and movies such as Bong Joon-ho's Oscar-winning Parasite and Park Chan-wook's Decision to Leave.
Why does a country of 50 million punch so consistently above its weight? 'South Korea rose from the ashes of the Korean War through intense competition,' Hwang says. 'As a kid I would see programmes on TV celebrating the fact that we had hit a particular number of exports. We were such a small nation, and very poor, and we had a mission to let our land be known to the world.'
North Korean characters feature in Squid Game, which makes you wonder if anyone there has seen it. 'It's a dangerous show for North Korea,' Hwang says. According to reports, a man who supplied North Korean students with a black-market copy was sentenced to death.
'I don't know how accurate that is. I doubt it would be easy for anyone to get access to the show.' While Kim Jong-un may see Squid Game as evidence of the evils of capitalism, Hwang says it shows 'that South Korea is a place where you can criticise capitalism, it proves the superiority of a free nation. In that sense it might be even more dangerous for North Korea.'
The series has spawned reality TV imitators including Squid Game: The Challenge from Netflix and Beast Games from the YouTuber Mr Beast, where entrants emulate the challenges to win big cash prizes, with no deaths but plenty of back-stabbing. There is also an immersive challenge in London, Squid Game: The Experience. 'That's capitalism for you,' Hwang says wryly.
'A series that acutely criticises capitalism can only be made if it is a commercial product and people want to invest in it. I'm not saying we need to turn ourselves into a socialist society — that era is done and gone. All we can do is to make improvements to liberal democracy and late capitalism. Nobody wants a loss — there's just more and more greed.'
His upcoming projects sound equally cheery. First up is a film called Killing Old People Club, based on an Umberto Eco work and with echoes of Logan's Run, the sci-fi movie in which everyone is killed when they reach the age of 30. There is also a possible series, partly inspired by the plan of Thanos in the Marvel films to kill half of all living beings so there are enough resources to go around. It's an idea that intrigues Hwang, who gave a villain in Squid Game the name Thanos.
With environmental threats rising and capitalism failing, he says, 'unless we come together as a race and decide that we need to make some sacrifices, humanity is bound to experience a huge crisis. Will we only realise after we lose half of humanity?'
Well, if anyone can dramatise the end of the world, it's Hwang Dong-hyuk.
The third season of Squid Game is on Netflix from June 27
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