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At the end of “Squid Game” Season 1, Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) makes a fateful decision. While boarding a flight to visit his daughter in the United States, he picks up the phone and calls the perpetrators of the fatal games he won. He says that he’s going to find them and end the games once and for all.
Gi-hun endures unspeakable horror in Season 1, but that finale depicts him a year after the Games ended, his carefree and positive personality lost in the calcified trauma of his trials. Ahead of the second season’s Netflix premiere, showrunner Hwang Dong-hyuk told IndieWire that the scene was meant to be a microcosm of the character’s internal shift, along with the fact that he turns around and goes back inside.
“Gi-hun gives up an opportunity to go see his daughter. He voluntarily gives that up in order to get his revenge, and that means that he was so consumed by this determination to get revenge that he was willing to give up something that was the most precious thing to him in his life,” Hwang told IndieWire through a translator. “In Season 2, I wanted him to seem as if he was just completely consumed by that determination, almost to the point of nearing insanity.”
Hwang and Lee discussed the shift extensively, including the actor’s weight loss and physical transformation. “I really wanted him to show that experience and process that Gi-hun would have gone through… whether it was the way his appearance is or the way he spoke, his tone and manner, or his actions, I wanted him to come across as convincing as possible in that character change,” Hwang said.
It’s also evident in Lee’s performance; even in the Season 2 trailers, Gi-hun is stoic and determined (look no further than those contrasting mug shots from his two game orientations), now back inside the games as part of a greater mission to end them. At the same time, Hwang said that he wanted to preserve what fans loved about Gi-hun in Season 1 and to add reminders of who he was before.
“If Season 1 was the story of [how] Gi-hun, who was very naive and clumsy and childlike at times, got into this brutal and extreme game and survives in his own way, Season 2 is about this changed man who is traumatized after these experiences,” Hwang elaborated. “It did almost feel like a different show, at least of a different color in terms of the character and also the character’s actions.”
But if there are kernels of the old Gi-hun in there, Season 2 might bring them to the surface. The trailers revealed the arrival of a new but familiar player: Gi-hun’s old friend Jung-bae, who he gambled and drank with before the games changed his life.
“Viewers may have gotten the hint that he’s also someone who’s under a lot of economic stress,” Hwang said about bringing the character back. “Gi-hun is a lot more serious and more focused and driven — however, by having this friend by his side, I thought that that could help him or help us show more of the old Gi-hun to the viewers, and because he’s in there fighting against and going against this mission, not by himself, but with this friend of his that he’s known for a long time. By having him in the games, I thought that I could bring more humanistic sides of Gi-hun to the show.”
Even with a reminder of his old life in the games with him, Gi-hun’s mission is clearer than ever — as is the object of his anger. The trailers also tease the return of Front Man (Lee Byung-hun), who allows Gi-hun to reenter the game and observes him with the other players. Season 1 revealed that the Front Man was once a player in the Games himself, but how he got to where he is remains a mystery. With the two former winners facing off, IndieWire asked Hwang what the Front Man thinks of Gi-hun at this moment — and the director replied immediately in English: “Jealous.”
“When you look at it from a Darth Vader versus Luke Skywalker perspective, the Front Man has completely crossed over to the dark side,” he elaborated through his translator. “To see Gi-hun, who still believes in the goodness of people, who is still in the light — while at the same time, he wants to win in the battle against him because Gi-hun still holds dear to his heart something that [Front Man] has already lost completely, I feel like he would feel a sense of jealousy toward him.”
“Squid Game 2” premieres December 26 on Netflix.
English (US) ·