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Squid Game " director Hwang Dong-hyuk compared the villains of the series toDonald Trump . - He told IndieWire that the VIPs running the cruel games "kind of resembles" the former president.
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"Squid Game" is a drama series about a group of people who risk their lives in a series of deadly children's games in order to win enough money to pay off their debt. Towards the end of the series, we find out that a group of rich elites called VIPs run the cruel survival games and bet on the contestants like racehorses.
Hwang Dong-hyuk, the creator and director of "Squid Game" previously told The Times of London that the series is a social commentary with the VIPs representing "the power elite, the global CEOs."
Speaking to IndieWire via a translator, Hwang compared these VIPs to Trump when describing how he came up with the story for the popular Netflix series.
"I conceived of the theories for the show in 2008. At the time, there was the Lehman Brothers crisis; the Korean economy was badly affected and I was also economically struggling," Hwang said.
"Over the past 10 years, there were a lot of issues: There was the cryptocurrency boom, where people around the world, especially young people in Korea, would go all-in and invest all their money into cryptocurrencies. And there was the rise of IT giants like Facebook, Google, and in Korea, there's Naver, and they are just restructuring our lives. It's innovative but these IT giants also got very rich."
He continued: "And then Donald Trump became the president of the United States and I think he kind of resembles one of the VIPs in the Squid Game. It's almost like he's running a game show, not a country, like giving people horror. After all these issues happened, I thought it was about time that this show goes out into the world."
Whether it was due to the social commentary or the skin-crawling tension, the series has been a massive success becoming the first Korean drama to top the US Netflix charts within its first week on the streaming platform. Variety also reported that Ted Sarandos, the Co-CEO of Netflix, said the series has a "very good" chance to be the most-watched series on the platform ever.
Hwang told IndieWire that the success of the show adds pressure for him to create a second season.
"I think I do have the obligation to explain it to the fans and I'm thinking about Season 2, but at the time, I was so tired after finishing Season 1, I couldn't really think of Season 2," he said. "But now that it's become such a big hit, people would hate me if I don't make a Season 2, so I feel a lot of pressure and think I'd have to. The big success of Season 1 is a big reward to me, but at the same time it's given me a lot of pressure."