Do we like Hwang Dong-hyuk?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A decent record with no harmful words of his own, held back a notch by the contested casting of a cis actor as a trans woman and a thin record on his personal conduct.
Squid Game itself sat on a shelf for about a decade because local investors and producers turned it down. Once it landed, it made him the first South Korean to win the Emmy for directing a drama series, in 2022. South Korea's president then gave him the Geumgwan Order of Cultural Merit, the country's highest cultural medal.
The harm check is mostly clean. Searches for anything he has said against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet came up empty, and what he says on the record points the other way. He told the Korea Times he wanted the series to tell viewers that cruelty is not who we are, and he has called the show a symbol of the extreme competition of late capitalism.
The asterisk is season two. The show added its first trans character and cast a cisgender man in the role, and critics asked why a trans actor wasn't hired. Hwang said the team first considered a real transgender actor but found very few openly trans or gay actors in Korea. Trans-rights critics were not satisfied with that, and a queer studies academic said the casting could be read as disrespect to minorities.
On how he treats people, there's no pattern of trouble in what we found. The one blip was in July 2023, when the Squid Game 2 makers apologised after a member of the production crew allegedly blocked people from an escalator at Incheon airport during a shoot. That was a crew complaint made online, not about him personally.
On the creative side he finished the show his own way. He has said he first thought about a happier ending for Gi-hun, then chose the sacrifice because it fitted the story better. His lead characters are ordinary people crushed by debt, and his best-known films keep returning to power and the people it squeezes.
Now he's heading back to cinema with K.O. Club, a sci-fi thriller about a near-future where money can buy youth. Lee Byung-hun, Oh Jung-se, Park Hae-soo, Cho Yeo-jeong and Kim So-jin are all on the cast list, none with a harm record in anything we read. He has also announced no co-stars or partners worth worrying about.