“The response that I got after 10 years was that it was, in fact, very realistic — that there are probably people playing this game somewhere in the world,” Hwang tellsthrough an interpreter. “And I think the pandemic also accelerated the situation a bit as well.
“When we were depicting the eliminations of the games, I wanted to express that elimination equals death,” he says. “In Korea, we don’t use guns, so the gun is actually a very unrealistic weapon in Korea. I personally thought that having the people be eliminated using a gun was in fact very unrealistic in a way, meaning that it was not as violent because it was more symbolic than realistic. It’s a simple and symbolic expression of the elimination equaling death.
Meanwhile, Jung, who plays a North Korean defector named Kang Sae-byeok, was one of the actors who auditioned.marks her acting debut: Jung is a South Korean model who recently became Louis Vuitton’s global ambassador., they might not only think of the games and the violence but also about the production design. Most of the show, which became Netflix’s most watched series, was shot on soundstages with some added CG.