Netflix‘s Squid Game Season 2 follows Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) as he returns to the deadly competition he won in Season 1. His mission is to confront the shadowy cabal of VIPs and managers who run the game with the goal of ending them once and for all.
**Spoilers for Squid Game Season 2, now streaming on Netflix**
However, because Gi-hun, aka Player 456, was the only player who survived his iteration of Squid Game, series creator, writer, and director Hwang Dong-hyuk needed to introduce 455 new contestants for Season 2. This time around, there’s a young pregnant woman, an elderly mother protecting her hapless adult son, and, most strikingly of all, a transgender woman.
Player 120, Hyung-ju (Park Sung-soon) immediately stands out thanks to her tall height and her noble brand of courage. During the first game, “Red Light, Green Light,” Gi-hun does his best to save as many players as possible, coaching them when to freeze, when to run, and when to stand in single-file to minimize their target. After Gi-hun crosses the finish line, he doubles back and returns to the killing field to bring a fallen player who has only been shot in the leg to safety. Only Player 120 joins him, ensuring all three finish in time. The injured man, though, is shot again by a sniper, eliminating him from the game.
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“By creating a character much like Hyun-ju and 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.”
Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk
When Decider asked Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk about the addition of a transgender character in Season 2, he compared the character’s purpose to that of Season 1 fan favorite Ali (Anupam Tripathi).
“I saw the people who come to join the games in Squid Game as people who are usually marginalized or neglected from society, and not just financially speaking,” Hwang said. “In Season 1, 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.”
“Today, unfortunately, in Korean society, the gender minority is a group that is not as accepted widely within society,” he continued. “Which is why I created the character Hyun-ju as a male to female transgender woman.”
Photo: Netflix
While American television is full of prominent transgender performers like Laverne Cox, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, and Eliot Page, Hwang admitted to TV Guide’s Kat Moon that Squid Game struggled to cast a Korean transgender actress to play Hyung-ju.
“In the beginning we were doing our research, and I was thinking of doing an authentic casting of a trans actor,” Hwang told TV Guide. “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.”
As Hwang explained to Decider, “Compared to before, it has gotten better. But still, in Korea, when you are a gender minority, it is not as widely accepted yet. Unfortunately, you are still seen to be very much out of the norm.”
Hwang eventually cast Park Sung-soon as Hyung-ju. Park is a popular cisgender male actor in Korea who has a history of not shying away from queer roles. “I have watched his work ever since his debut, and I had complete trust in him that he would be the right person in terms of talent in portraying this character,” Hwang said to TV Guide.
Naturally, the decision to cast a cisgender actor in a transgender role has spurred controversy. Hwang told Decider, though, that he hoped the inclusion of Hyun-ju in Squid Game could pave the way for more mainstream acceptance of transgender people in Korea, which in turn could lead to more prominent out transgender actresses.
“By creating a character much like Hyun-ju and 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,” Hwang said.
