Star Lee Jung-jae feels “hugely sad” over Squid Game’s success

Squid Game is about a dystopian near future where people are so desperate to get out of debt they’re willing to put their lives on the line. What does it say that it resonated with so many people?

Squid Game came out on nowhere on Netflix last year to become the biggest hit in the streamer’s history, and a proper pop culture phenomenon to boot. It tells the story of a group of people so desperate to get out of debt they’re willing to put their lives on the line by playing a series of twisted children’s games put together by a group of rich a**holes amused by all these poors fighting to the death. It’s as bleakly dystopian a show as I can remember ever seeing, so the fact that it’s so popular says…something.

“I’m happy about it, of course, but it’s bittersweet,” star Lee Jung-jae told The Guardian. “Yes, it’s great that audiences are consuming Korean content around the world. And they appreciate it. But if you think about the themes of Squid Game–how far are we willing to go to accumulate personal wealth; the lengths people are forced to go to–the fact it resonated with so many around the world is worrying. You get a sense this is the reality for so many people globally. And that makes me feel hugely sad.”

"[We] had to express the experiences of these characters being pushed to those extremes. Doing that? It was terrible. The more beautiful the game set was, and the more childish and fun it seemed, the more horrific it was for the characters, and therefore us as actors.I do think about what happened in that show. It’s impossible not to. And it made me think about what I’m not doing. Many of us live obliviously. It made me rethink how I look at the world. It couldn’t not."

Hollywood has a history of not seeming to get the point of the material it’s selling to people. For instance, Netflix is working on a Squid Game reality show where one lucky winner will get a $4.56 million prize. Obviously they won’t actually kill the contestants who lose the games (…I hope), but wasn’t the point that these games were exploitative and the product of a broken economic system?

So it’s complicated. I’ll still watch Squid Game season 2 whenever it comes out. And it is cool that the show became so popular in the U.S. despite being in a foreign language; Lee Jung-jae himself became the first person to win an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama series for a non-English role. He’s also the first Asian man to win that honor. “The world is moving closely together,” he said. “We’re seeing an increase in the exchanges between countries, and increased understanding. And we’ve realised that in art and culture, language needn’t be the first priority.”

Lee Jung-jae’s new movie Hunt is out in theaters now.

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