The director of Squid Game believes that former president Donald Trump "kind of resembles" one of the show's villains.
The hugely popular Korean Netflix series has become the most-watched show on the platform in more than 90 countries, and fans of the show have been showering the cast with praise for delivering incredibly poignant and nuanced performances throughout its nine episodes.
The show centers around a group of 456 people who risk their lives as part of a mysterious survival show in a bid to win $38,460,271.20 (₩45.6 billion).
Towards the end of the series, we find out that a group of rich elites called VIPs run the cruel survival games and bet on the contestants like racehorses.
Hwang Dong-hyuk, the creator and director of Squid Game previously told The Times that the series is a social commentary with the VIPs representing "the power elite, the global CEOs."
Speaking to IndieWire via a translator, Hwang compared these VIPs to Trump when describing how he came up with the story for the popular Netflix series.
"I conceived of the theories for the show in 2008. At the time, there was the Lehman Brothers crisis; the Korean economy was badly affected and I was also economically struggling," Hwang said.
He continued: "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.
"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."
Hwang went on: "And then Donald Trump became the president of the United States and I think he kind of resembles one of the VIPs in the Squid Game. 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."
