When Squid Game 2 arrives next week, fans are going to meet a lot of new faces—including Hyun-ju, aka Player 120, the show’s first trans character. She joins the competition hoping to earn enough money to complete her gender affirming surgery, and she proves to be both a quick-thinking leader and, thanks to her former career as a soldier, an absolute badass.
At a recent press day for Squid Game 2, director and creator Hwang Dong-hyuk spoke to a group of journalists, including io9, about why he wanted to include a trans character this time around.
“The people who come to join the games in Squid Game are usually marginalized or neglected from society, and not just financially speaking, but people who would belong to marginalized groups,” Hwang explained through a translator. “In season one, the representative character for that was Ali, who was a foreigner working in Korea, which is one of the most representative minority groups in Korea. Currently today, unfortunately, in the Korean society the gender minority is a group that is not as accepted widely within society. I wanted to create a character that would represent that.”
Hwang said acceptance of trans people has gotten better recently, but it’s still not where it needs to be. “In Korea, when you are a gender minority, it is not as widely accepted yet, unfortunately, and you are still seen to be very much out of the norm,” he said. “And so by creating a character like Hyun-ju, through her choices, her actions, and the way she carries herself in the game, I hope that that could raise awareness of these issues that we face today.”
In a different interview Hwang did with TV Guide, he addressed the fact that though Hyun-Ju is a trans woman, she’s portrayed by a cis male actor, Park Sung-hoon.
While this practice used to be very common in the West—one recent example: Eddie Redmayne was Oscar-nominated for playing a trans woman in 2015’s The Danish Girl—it’s now something casting directors and creators steer away from, instead preferring to have trans performers play trans characters. However, culture in South Korea isn’t there yet, as Hwang told TV Guide.
“I did anticipate such discussions to arise from the first moment I began creating the character Hyun-ju. In the beginning we were doing our research, and I was thinking of doing an authentic casting of a trans actor,” Hwang said. That proved more difficult than he’d realized. “When we researched in Korea, there are close to no actors that are openly trans, let alone openly gay, because unfortunately in the Korean society currently the LGBTQ community is rather still marginalized and more neglected, which is heartbreaking … It was near impossible to find someone who we could cast authentically.”
Choosing Park Sung-hoon was the best next option, according to Hwang: “I had complete trust in him that he would be the right person in terms of talent in portraying this character.”
Meet Player 120 and more new characters when Squid Game 2 hits Netflix December 26.
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