Note: This story contains spoilers from “Squid Game” Season 2.
“Squid Game” was never supposed to last three seasons. Series creator and director Hwang Dong-hyuk, who’s been working on the series since 2008, didn’t expect it to make it past Season 1. Then it became Netflix’s biggest global hit, and he was tasked with expanding his dark and twisted South Korean thriller.
“When I first started writing… I thought it would just be Season 2,” Hwang told TheWrap. “But the story got longer, and because I included a lot of characters and more incidents, the episodes increased.” After spending six months writing this unexpected installment, Hwang sat down with Netflix and decided to split the season in half and release Season 3 in 2025.
The decision to renew “Squid Game” was an easy call for Netflix. The 2021 series is the streamer’s most-watched original series of all time, securing a staggering 2.2 billion hours viewed in its first 91 days. It went on to make Emmys history, winning six awards and becoming the first non-English-language project to be nominated for Outstanding Drama Series. Lee Jung-jae secured the award for Outstanding Lead Actor, the first for an Asian actor in a non-English part.
But as much of a no-brainer renewing the series was for Netflix, it led to an arduous year of filming for the cast and crew involved. “It was quite physically and mentally draining,” Lee Jung-jae, who plays the series’ main character and returning champion Gi-hun, told TheWrap.
“If we had waited to shoot Season 3, I think our understanding of our character and the story would have been less deep,” Lee Byung-hun, who plays the double agent In-ho, told TheWrap. “But because it was such a long duration of shooting, it was both physically and mentally taxing. We were all very tired by the end of the process.”
That exhaustion came not just from the length of filming, but also from the scope of the final two seasons. Season 1 of “Squid Game” followed a straightforward story. Gambling addict Gi-hun agrees to compete against 455 other players in a series of deadly childhood games. For each person who dies, the amount he can win increases by 100 million won, leading to a possible fortune of 45.6 billion won. In Season 1, the first challenge — Red Light, Green Light — becomes a massacre that kills 255 people. But because the season follows Gi-hun trying to save as many people as possible, this first massacre doesn’t kill nearly as many people as it did in 2021.
“More people alive means there’s a lot of extras on set every day and, of course, all their staff that is helping them out,” executive producer Kim Ji-yeonso told TheWrap. “It was just an immense scale with so many people on set.”
“Squid Game” Season 2 took three years to complete, six months to write and a year to film. From a shoot that included over 500 cast and crew in a dusty enclosed space to a shootout scene that took six months to coordinate, the season stands as one of the most ambitious productions of the year.
And Netflix is working to squeeze even more out of the show. The reality series “Squid Game: The Experience” has opened in New York City; Madrid, Spain; and Sydney, Australia, with locations coming to Seoul, South Korea, in 2025. The Netflix original has also partnered with 23 companies globally, creating promotional content for everything from “Call of Duty” and Domino’s Pizza to Kia and Google.
Here’s how the “Squid Game” team worked to create a potential international mega-hit once again.
Back in the game
It was vital that this season reflect a more modern world, while still feeling as tense and surprising as the first “Squid Game.” One of the biggest changes had to do with the age of players. Season 1 mostly focused on middle-aged players who were in debt, players that Hwang said “ will likely try to play the game until the end.” This time around Hwang wanted to explore how investments in cryptocurrency and stocks had impacted people.
“There are a lot of younger generations who are already neck deep in debt,” Hwang explained. “Because [this season’s players] are younger, it led to the increase of diversity within the games and also a sense of wildness. They have a lot of adrenaline and energy. This took the craziness of the games to another level.”
One of those younger players is Thanos, a purple-haired rapper in debt from crypto who quickly becomes one of this season’s biggest villains. When it came time to cast this season, Hwang drafted a list of performers he thought would be good for the show, a common practice in South Korea, and asked them to send in a self-tape.
Choi Seung-hyun, aka rapper T.O.P., was cast as Thanos because “he was able to open up a lot about his own personal story to Director Hwang,” Kim said. “In their conversations, they built this Thanos character.” Before he pursued solo work, Choi was a member of Korean boy band BigBang, one of the most influential acts in K-pop history. “It was a moment for him to reflect on his career and his life in the music industry.”
Choi worked with hair and makeup designer Son Eun-ju to define the look of his character. “Ultimately, we created a large tattoo spelling ‘Thanos’ in Korean, which perfectly suited the narcissistic character,” Son told TheWrap. As for his notable hair, that complimentary shade of purple was specifically chosen based on Choi’s past hair styles as well as the overall visual aesthetic of the series.
One of the most notable new characters is Hyun-ju, a trans woman in debt for gender-affirming surgery played by Park Sung-hoon. Though the show has been criticized for casting a cis man in the role, Hwang defended the decision, stating that it was “near impossible” to cast the role authentically as there are few trans actors in South Korea due to the country’s stance on LGBTQ+ rights.
“There are many incidents in Korea where transgender people suffer prejudice and discrimination,” Hwang said. The character was inspired in part by Byun Hee-soo, a staff sergeant who died by suicide after she was dismissed from the military for undergoing gender reassignment surgery. “[Hyun-ju] is a character who has been damaged a lot by society but still has inner beauty as a human regardless of her gender.”
Bigger and wilder sets
By now, the games in “Squid Game” are even more iconic than its characters. That proved to be a problem the second time around.
“There was definitely difficulty in coming up with the games because Director Hwang used all his favorite games and ideas in Season 1, not knowing there would be a Season 2,” Kim said. That left the team with the difficult task of developing games that felt new to the audience, incorporated childhood games and allowed for a vast amount of surviving players.
From the start, outfitting actors for the games proved a challenge “because the cast and situations were so close to reality,” Son said. The makeup team had to keep track of exactly how much blood and sweat were on each player while accounting for how much each actor was actually sweating through the season’s physically exhausting scenes. The makeup team used “every type of blood available,” from fake blood that could flow with sweat to edible blood. “Without working in perfect sync, it would have been impossible to keep track of the situations involving over 400 people, which made us worry about whether we could finish successfully.”
For the makeup team, ‘Squid Game’ Season 2 “was like a game in itself,” Son said.
One game was hailed as the most difficult to film: the Six-legged Race. Rather than playing one childhood game, it required players to play six consecutive minigames, starting with Ddakji (the blue and red origami tile game seen in Season 1) and ending with hitting a hacky sack. The characters had to do all of that with their ankles tied together.
“That was the only game where participants root for each other,” Hwang said. “I thought [while writing the game], if we can increase the opportunities for people to support and root for each other, society will get better.”
The scale of the Six-Legged Race included about 360 players and 150 crew members in an indoor set. The gravel used for the set also complicated matters. While it helped mirror a childhood playground, it also resulted in a huge group of people kicking up dust in the middle of flu season.
“It was the most fun, but also the most exhausting,” Lee Byung-hun said. “Every time one group did a run around, [the set] was completely filled with dust, and it was hard to breathe.”
“Everyone got really sick,” Hwang said. “As soon as I said ‘Cut,’ everyone started coughing, including me. It took more than two weeks to shoot the scene.”
The Mingling game also posed a technical challenge because it placed players on a spinning platform. Once the platform stopped spinning, a number was called and players had to quickly split into groups of that number and rush into empty rooms. Naturally for this morbid show, if they failed to reach a room or if they entered with too many or too few people, they were killed.
“As more contestants were being killed and the number of people on the turntable was shrinking, it was actually OK. But when we were starting with all the surviving contestants, it would start and stop,” Kim said. Those sudden stops caused many actors to actually fall.
Then there was Season 2’s final shootout. After convincing his fellow contestants the leaders of Squid Game needed to be overthrown, Gi-hun and a group of players stole guns from the guards. Thus marked the beginning of the massive shootout that served as Season 2’s climax in Episode 7. Building the various bright staircases for the battle took roughly six months. The scene also required seven days of training from the stunt coordination team led by Park Young-sick and Chung Seong-ho — and filming took between seven and 10 days.
“They prepared for it meticulously,” Lee Jung-jae said, praising the series’ VFX and production teams. The fight, which ended with the Front Man murdering Gi-hun’s best friend Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan), was also the most mentally demanding for Lee.
“[The scene] is very emotional, but it required a lot of physical preparation as well,” Lee said. “We both really pondered on how to make the scene work.”
The bloody future
Season 2 may have taken three years to be released, but that won’t be the case for Season 3, which has already been filmed and is set to premiere in 2025.
Though “Squid Game” emerged as Netflix’s most watched series of all time, Hwang didn’t go into its premiere with a lofty deal, largely because no one was expecting the series to be as big of a hit as it was. Famously, his original contract with Netflix did not include a clause for performance-related bonuses. And though the scripted series is something Hwang has worked on since 2008, he does not have creative control over the franchise; Netflix does.
Hwang assured TheWrap that he was paid more for Seasons 2 and 3 though he didn’t get into specifics. “It got better, for sure. That’s why I did it,” Hwang said. “I was happy about it. That’s all I can say. I got more money.”
Even though his scripted series is coming to an end, Hwang said it won’t mark the end of his franchise.
“I know Netflix has a plan. They are not going to throw this idea away,” Hwang said. He noted that David Fincher is developing an English-language version of the series. And “Squid Game: The Challenge,” which first premiered in 2023, has already been renewed for a second season despite complaints of “horrific” behind-the-scenes conditions as well as threats of legal action. (Neither Hwang nor Kim were involved in the making of “Squid Game: The Challenge.”)
“Maybe I’ll be in one of those projects as an advisor or co-creator. Who knows?” Hwang said. “But Season 3 is not going to be the end of the ‘Squid Game’ universe.”
“Squid Game” Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.
