Squid Game Director Compares Trump to One of the Series Villains: He’s ‘Giving People Horror’

Brandon Bell/Getty Images, Netflix

Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has compared former President Donald Trump to one of the show’s villainous VIPs.

Speaking with Indiewire on Sunday, Dong-hyuk shared that he conceived the show’s premise during the 2008 global financial crisis, saying, “At the time, there was the Lehman Brothers crisis; the Korean economy was badly affected and I was also economically struggling.”

“Over the past 10 years, there were a lot of issues: There was the cryptocurrency boom, where people around the world, especially young people in Korea, would go all-in and invest all their money into cryptocurrencies,” Dong-hyuk added. “And there was the rise of IT giants like Facebook, Google, and in Korea, there’s Naver, and they are just restructuring our lives. It’s innovative but these IT giants also got very rich.”

In the series, hundreds of people in debt risk their lives to compete in a string of fatal children’s games in order to win 45.6 billion won ($38 million). In the final episodes, viewers discover that a group of male, largely White elites, which Dong-hyuk confirmed parallel “the global CEOs,” watch and bet on the competitors.

“Donald Trump became the president of the United States and I think he kind of resembles one of the VIPs in the Squid Game,” Dong-hyuk said of the show’s inspiration. “It’s almost like he’s running a game show, not a country, like giving people horror. After all these issues happened, I thought it was about time that this show goes out into the world.”