Hwang Dong-hyuk, the creator of Netflix’s popular Korean survival drama Squid Game, has recently revealed that he drew inspiration from Donald Trump to materialise his ideas for the critically acclaimed show, claiming that the former president’s administration felt like a game show.
“I conceived of the theories for the show in 2008,” Dong-hyuk recently told Indie Wire. “At the time, there was the Lehman Brothers crisis; the Korean economy was badly affected and I was also economically struggling.”
The Squid Game creator went on to explain that “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,” he added, pointing out that “It’s innovative but these IT giants also got very rich.”
According to Hwang Dong-hyuk, Squid Game’s rich and villainous VIPs were mainly inspired by Donald Trump, more specifically after he became the 45th President of the United States.
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To provide further context, for those who may not be familiar with Squid Game, VIPs are insanely wealthy and corrupt characters that are introduced near the end of the show’s first season, who wear expensive-looking animal masks and bet on participants of the show’s eponymous competition.
“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,” the creator and director of the popular Netflix series explained.
He later added, “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.”
Hwang Dong-hyuk does not really reveal why exactly he believes that former president Donald Trump is the embodiment of the greedy, and villainous nature of the VIPs in his popular Netflix series.
Was the Squid Game creator not aware that the 45th President of the United States promised, during his presidential campaign, that he would be turning down the $400,000 annual U.S. presidential salary were he to be elected?
“The first thing I’m going to do is tell you that if I’m elected president, I’m accepting no salary, OK?” Donald Trump said in September of 2015 ahead of the 2016 presidential race, adding, “That’s no big deal for me.”
Not only did former President Trump promise that he would not be accepting the presidential salary, but he kept his promise and donated a grand total of $1.6 million to various federal agencies — thus becoming the first president since John F. Kennedy to donate his salary.
Some of the agencies Trump donated his presidential salary to include the Department of Interior’s National Park Service, the Department of Education, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, to name only a few.
What do you make of Hwang Dong-hyuk’s comments about the villainous VIPs in Squid Game being based on Donald Trump? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section down below or on social media.