The story behind Squid Game Season Two feels like it should be a story in the South Korean thriller’s long-delayed return. The making of the show’s first season — an ultra-violent satire of late-stage capitalism, where financially desperate people compete in a series of children’s games and the lone surviving player will go home with billions in cash — was so difficult and stressful that its creator, Hwang Dong-hyuk, claims he lost “eight or nine” teeth over the course of that initial shoot. It was an experience that unsurprisingly left him wary of continuing the series, even though he ended things on a cliffhanger back in 2021.
So why did Hwang eventually agree to make more? “Money,” he bluntly told the BBC. “Even though the first series was such a huge global success, honestly I didn’t make much. So doing the second series will help compensate me…
