The first season of the South Korean dystopian survival thriller television series Squid Game was created, written, and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk for Netflix, where it was released worldwide on September 17, 2021.
The season stars Lee Jung-jae, Park Hae-soo, O Yeong-su, Wi Ha-joon, Jung Ho-yeon, Heo Sung-tae, Anupam Tripathi and Kim Joo-ryoung. It 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 billion cash prize, ₩100 million taken from each eliminated contestant.
The season 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 received numerous accolades, including a Golden Globe Award for O, and Screen Actors Guild Awards for Lee and Jung, respectively; all three were also the first Korean actors to win in those categories. The first season 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 for Outstanding Lead Actor, the first for an Asian actor in a non-English part.
Episodes
Cast and characters
Numbers in parentheses denote the character's assigned player number in the Squid Game universe.
Main cast Lee Jung-jae as Seong Gi-hun (, 456), Park Hae-soo as Cho Sang-woo (, 218), Lee Byung-hun as Hwang In-ho, the Front Man O Yeong-su as Oh Il-nam (, 001), Jung Ho-yeon as Kang Sae-byeok (, 067), Heo Sung-tae as Jang Deok-su (, 101), Anupam Tripathi as Ali Abdul (, 199), Kim Joo-ryoung as Han Mi-nyeo (, 212),
Special guest stars Gong Yoo as the Recruiter, a salesman who finds participants for the Game
Recurring cast Wi Ha-joon as Hwang Jun-ho (), Yoo Sung-joo as Byeong-gi (, 111), Lee Yoo-mi as Ji-yeong (, 240), Kim Young-ok as Oh Mal-soon, Gi-hun's mother Cho Ah-in as Seong Ga-yeong, Gi-hun's daughter Lee Seo-hwan as Park Jung-bae, Gi-hun's best friend 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, the younger brother of Kang Sae-byeok Kim Si-hyun as Player 244, a pastor Lee Sang-hee as Do Jung-soo, a glass maker who has been making glass for over 30 years (, 017), Kim Yun-tae as Player 069, the husband of Player 070 Lee Ji-ha as Player 070, the wife of Player 069 Kwak Ja-hyoung as Player 278 Christian Lagahit as Player 276 John D Michaels as VIP #1 Daniel C Kennedy as VIP #2 David Lee as VIP #3 Geoffrey Giuliano as VIP #4 Stephane Mot as VIP #5 Michael Davis as VIP #6
Guest cast as Mr. Kim, a loan shark Choi Jae-sup as Park Man-cheol, a broker Lee Jung-jun as Young Guard
Production
Development
Writing
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.
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 season's title". The colors of the ddakjis in the initial game, which are blue and red, were inspired from the Korean and Japanese 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? (우리 집에 왜 왔니?, a Korean variant of the Hana Ichi Monme), the former later being used in the second season.
Hwang wrote all of the season 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 physical and mental challenges in the creation of the season, saying that he had forgone dental health while making it, 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 season?"
Casting
Casting for the season was confirmed on June 17, 2020.
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 season 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.
Costume, set design, and filming
Production and filming of the season 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. 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 season 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.
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 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 off the ground, which further created anxiety for some of the actors with fears of heights.
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 in the show's title card in most language adaptations. These are shapes associated with the playing field for the children's game of Squid (ojingeo). 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).
Music