- Gong Yoo returns in “Squid Game” season two as the recruiter.
- Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk told BI he wanted to explore the character’s backstory and true nature.
- That true nature is pretty wild — and Gong embraces it in his performance.
Gong Yoo’s ddakji-playing recruiter is blessedly back in “Squid Game” season two — and this time, his appearance is even more memorable.
Gong plays the recruiter, a well-dressed, frankly unfairly attractive man who approaches people and challenges them to a game of ddakji. If they win a round, he gives them money. If they lose, he slaps them. Win-win! After enough time, he’ll invite them to participate in a game with a much larger prize pool, and much more severe consequences for losing.
He appears only briefly in season one to recruit Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) into the games. More memorably, he utterly trounces Gi-hun in ddakji, slapping him no less than ten times all while remaining perfectly pleasant and composed. It’s enough to, if you’re a true freak, make him want to slap you too.
Luckily for those of us who have been thinking about this scene for the past three years, there’s a whole lot more Gong Yoo in season two.
“I got many, many requests, people asking me to tell us the backstory about the ddakji man,” creator Hwang Dong-hyuk told Business Insider. “I also thought of him to be a very intriguing character, so I wanted to bring him back again in season two and give him is own narrative.”
Warning: Spoilers ahead for season two, episode one of “Squid Game.”
Gi-hun tracks down the recruiter as a means to an end
In season two, Gi-hun is a man on a mission: he wants to shut down the games, and to do so, he needs to pin down his first point of contact. That’s ddakji guy, and Gi-hun enlists a veritable small army of foot soldiers to scour the Seoul subway system for people getting slapped. It’s slow going until Gi-hun’s former creditor Mr. Kim (Kim Pub-lae) and his associate Woo-seok (Jeon Seok-ho) actually manage to find him.
They pursue him from the subway, to a bakery, to a convenience store, to a park, and eventually to an alleyway. Unfortunately, Mr. Kim and Woo-seok are no match for six feet of bitch-slapping recruiter, and he captures them and forces them to play a game that leaves Mr. Kim dead.
When Gi-hun returns to the motel where he’s taken up residence, he finds the recruiter waiting for him. During their conversation, the recruiter reveals his backstory: after getting brought into the game as a guard, he was given a gun. After killing a player who turned out to be his father, the recruiter realized that his calling was…. leading people to their violent deaths. Sure!
This time, the recruiter challenges Gi-hun not to ddakji, but a modified game of Russian Roulette that will inevitably leave one of them dead. Apparently, he’s a man prone to absurd melodrama, because he queues up “Time To Say Goodbye” by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman to set the tone.
After trying to convince Gi-hun to acknowledge that he’s a “piece of trash” like everyone else who ended up in the games, the recruiter ends up with the last bullet in the gun — and after Gi-hun calls him a dog, ddakji man pulls the trigger, ending his own life.
No more Mr. Nice Ddakji Guy
In season one, the recruiter was an entrancing figure because of the difference in his demeanor (perfect, poised) and actions (slapping the daylights out of people). This time, however, Hwang told BI that he wanted to not only reveal his backstory, but also, “what kind of state he is in as a human being.”
The answer? One untethered to anything except his objectively wild and remarkably strong convictions. This is a man who does it all — harassing people already being crushed by debt, sentencing them to a death game, and murder — for the love of the game. It’s not really clear why he believes people, like those he recruits into the games, are trash. On the flip side, it’s incredibly clear that he’s a sadist who will play any game he initiates to the end, even if he has to forfeit his own life.
Gong brings a charged energy to his sequences in episode one — particularly his confrontation with Gi-hun — that remains largely unmatched by the rest of the season. His physicality, whether it’s getting up in another performer’s space or spinning the barrel of a pistol, is unmatched.
“Gong Yoo is an actor who’s mostly taken on very sweet characters,” Hwang said. “He’s never done something that’s as crazy or insane as this one, so I was personally curious to see how he was going to portray the character as well.”
In season one, it was clear that the recruiter was a tightly coiled spring. In season two, Hwang and Gong finally let him snap.
“Squid Game” season two is now streaming on Netflix.
