By The first real footage from the second season of “Squid Game” arrived Thursday as part of Netflix’s Geeked Week celebrations, and now series creator/director Hwang Dong-hyuk has offered some new insights to EW about the new season.
One thing he wants to make clear right off the bat – the bad hair dye job that Seong Gi-hun/Player 456 (Lee Jung-jae) got at the end of the first season is gone – Hwang laughs as he says “the red hair is no more”.
There will, however, be a very brief part at the very start of the second season where Lee’s character has the hair with the actor saying that coming back and shooting with it “felt very strange, to say the least”.
Seong will be a quite different person in the second season which takes place three years later. The events of the first season and the time afterwards have changed him. Hwang says:
“In season 2, you will not be getting the foolish and clumsy or childish at times Gi-hun that you saw in the beginning. You will get to see a much heavier, darker side of Gi-hun.”
The character’s mother died while he was away, his daughter moved to the States, and he carries a “huge amount of survivor’s guilt” from being the sole survivor of the prior games. So he’s spent three years planning his revenge:
“He spent that time believing that these games must not continue, and he must put an end to it. He spent that time trying to track down those who are behind the game.”
Even with his new fortune, he hasn’t been able to do anything in the outside world and so comes to the conclusion the only way to accomplish his goal is by re-entering the game and take it down from the inside. This time though, he’s not a regular player. Lee says:
“Gi-hun is back again in his green tracksuit. Gi-hun’s purpose is not to play the game, but to go after those who have created the game and put a stop to it. Compared to every other participant within the game and also himself in season 1, the approach that he takes is going to be very different this time around. It could almost be described as a game-within-a-game for Gi-hun.”
Lee says most of the games will be new this time around, though once again will be “simple children’s games that a lot of kids in Korea grew up playing.”
One difference is the games may be a bit more universally recognized this time, selections being Korean games that have equivalents in other countries – much like the tug of war game in the first.
Hwang says some characters who made fleeting appearances in the first season will “actually carry a lot of weight and play an important role in season 2.”
Hwang adds there’s going to be a lot more characters this time around in terms of sheer numbers with them being more complicated characters than the sometimes simple supporting ones of the first: “the dynamics and relationships between the characters will be a lot more intense and intertwined with one another.”
The second season of “Squid Game” premieres December 26th.
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