‘Squid Game’ creator says season 2 mother/son duo not inspired by reality show version

Warning: This article contains spoilers about the Squid Game season 2 finale.

It’s becoming a real family affair on Squid Game.

After a real-life mother/son duo debuted on the reality show spinoff Squid Game: The Challenge last year, season 2 of Netflix’s scripted version also introduced a mother and son duo. Is this a case of art imitating life? Shockingly, no!

Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk tells Entertainment Weekly that it’s actually a total coincidence, and that he was not inspired by the reality show contestants when creating his new season 2 characters. “I wrote the script earlier than when the show The Challenge came out, so it wouldn’t make sense even chronologically to be inspired by that,” he says.

The showrunner points to a season 1 storyline that was similar to the complex, in-game relationship between Geum-ja, a.k.a. Player 149 (Kang Ae-sim), and her son Yong-sik, a.k.a. Player 007 (Yang Dong-geun).

“Those of you who watched closely will know there’s a married couple that appeared in season 1 where the couple plays marbles together, and then the husband survives and then ends up taking his own life,” Hwang says. “I thought that the Host [O Yeong-su] and the Front Man [Lee Byung-hun] would be the type of people who would deliberately bring close people together within the same game to put them in a test and see what happens to them in these extreme circumstances.”

After delivering the tragic tale of the husband and wife in the first season, Hwang wanted to dial up the drama in season 2 with a mother and son unknowingly entering the game together, as both intended to alleviate the son’s financial debts. “This time around, I wanted to bring in an even closer pair,” he adds. “And just having the Host look and observe, ‘How will they survive? How will they move on to each game?’ I thought that would be a very intriguing addition.”

While their fates (along with everyone else’s) are left up in the air by the end of the season 2 finale, Geum-ja and Yong-sik have already gone through plenty of trauma together. Geum-ja was ready to sacrifice her life to save her son, but he did not show the same heroic, selfless love back to her. During the Mingle game, he abandoned her to save himself, and tearfully apologized to her afterward, when he saw that she survived. After that crisis of faith, Yong-sik promised to never betray her again, and she continued to look out for him by not allowing him to take part in Gi-hun’s (Lee Jung-jae) finale rebellion.

The actor who plays Yong-sik tells EW that filming the moment of betrayal was difficult for him on many levels. “I didn’t really know exactly what emotion I was supposed to express,” Yang says. “We shot this scene over, and over, and over again, take after take… And in my personal life, I am very distant from my own mom. My mom in reality is very ferocious and scary — we don’t have the type of relationship where we share our inner thoughts or feelings, so it was strange to have that on set and to be able to act in a way that these two people have that relationship. Doing that was difficult, being able to express that in a truthful way, because that isn’t actually my lived reality.”

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Kang doesn’t believe that Geum-ja harbors any lingering resentment or hurt from her son’s betrayal after his apology as they head into season 3. “They are playing a game of life and death,” she tells EW. “Rather than feeling this resentment over his betrayal, I think her focus really is that her son is alive. And because he is alive, the other things that occurred in the process of the game are less important.”

Meanwhile, the 2023 reality show introduced the instant fan-favorite mother/son duo of Player 302/LeAnn Wilcox Plutnicki and Player 301/Trey Plutnicki. While they seemed to be frontrunners in the game, a midseason twist pitted them against each other in Marbles, and ultimately Trey eliminated his own mother. He continued on, but was eliminated shortly after in the Glass Bridge challenge.

“I felt as though we played the whole game together, so it would only make sense if we played Marbles together,” Trey previously told EW. “That’s not strategic at all, but it sounds dope when I say it out loud.”

Squid Game season 2 is now streaming, and will return with season 3 in 2025, on Netflix.