Going into Season 2 of “Squid Game,” stunt coordinator Park Young-sick was less concerned with upping the ante of Season 1’s action work (which won an Emmy for Outstanding Stunt Performance) than with aligning the fight sequences with the characters’ more desperate emotional states. The first time around, all the players went into the competition as blank slates, unaware of just how brutal a fight to the death they were entering. And most of them, including the winner, Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), were inexperienced brawlers. Not so for round two.
“I think everyone came into the games already knowing what’s going to happen — people are going to be dying. This is a cruel game that they’re playing,” Park said through a translator. “Gi-hun comes in in a very solemn and determined manner, where he vows to save other people. He’s had those years of training. So we wanted to portray how he was a little bit more skilled than he was in Season 1.”
This is clear in Episode 7, where Gi-hun leads a rebellion against the masked guards dressed in hot-pink jumpsuits. When one of the guards approaches him as he’s playing dead on the floor, he nimbly leaps to his feet and overpowers his enemy. And he’s not the only player with greater physical abilities this time around. Park and his fellow stunt coordinator Jeong Seong-ho also had to show the dexterity of new competitors who are ex-military or, in the case of In-ho (Lee Byung-hun), ex-police.
In one scene, In-ho, aka Front Man, an overseer of the competition masquerading as a player, confronts the purple-haired braggart Thanos (Choi Seung-hyun) and his sidekick Nam-gyu (Roh Jae-won) as they’re pummeling their nemesis Myung-gi (Yim Si-wan). In a swift, seemingly effortless move, In-ho throws Thanos to the ground and starts choking him with one hand while raising the other in a tight fist ready to punch.
“He’s already killed and hurt many people,” Park said. “So when he goes into wanting to attack someone, there is no hesitation. Thanos and Nam-gyu, they’re not great fighters. They’re just bullies, the bad kids on the block. So we wanted to make sure there was that balance there. I had a lot of fun with that.”
A particularly brutal battle takes place in the men’s bathroom. Straddling Myung-gi, Thanos delivers blow after blow until his opponent suddenly shoves a fork into Thanos’ chin and kills him. After going through blocking with the actors, the stunt coordinators worked closely with the makeup and prosthetics teams to determine the fork’s entry point and degree of gore on Thanos’ face, which the camera holds in a tight shot.
“One of the important points that we had to deliver through that sequence was the clear death of Thanos,” Park said. “For certain figures, you might go into this sequence having this person die after an intense fight — you would show a wide fight scene and then you would find him dead. But we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to convey a sense of punishment for his evil — almost karma.”
Of course, this being “Squid Game,” violence begets more violence. Moments after Thanos’ bloody demise, the camera pulls back to reveal the entire group beating on each other, pursuing opponents into stalls and throwing bodies into mirrors. “We needed to show that people were in groups, that they were coming at each other from different sides, and that’s why we wanted to use some of the wider shots,” Park said. Here, too, some players are more deft in the ring than others. “Just as much as the narrative of each character is extremely important, their physical capabilities are very important in designing the action,” Park said. “That is one of the most important things with my work.”
This story first ran in the Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
