They told him no one would watch. In 2009, director Hwang Dong-hyuk tried writing what would become Squid Game as a feature film. It was a time of global financial crisis. Hwang himself was in debt, as were his mother and grandmother. But for all his efforts, he couldn’t secure financing for a movie about hundreds of desperate individuals competing to the death in children’s games for a large cash prize. “People were telling me that it’s too unrealistic,” Hwang says. It was too absurd, they said—and far too violent—so he put his script away. A decade passed, during which Hwang directed three acclaimed films: The Crucible, Miss Granny, and The Fortress. But he didn’t forget Squid Game, and in 2018, he found himself revisiting the old script. “It was a very strange experience,” he says, “because what seemed so unrealistic at the time didn’t feel as unrealistic anymore.”

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By then, inequality was rising worldwide, a hate-propagating former reality show host had become president of the U.S., and Hwang’s story of disastrously indebted Korean residents vying for $38 million in an elaborate, ruthless game orchestrated by plutocrats no longer sounded so far-fetched. Hwang showed the script to Netflix, which had recently opened a division in Asia, and they agreed. It was an astute bet. The film was expanded into a series, and within 10 days of its release, the Korean television drama was the most watched Netflix show in 90 countries. In nations as different as the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia, people have competed in large-scale, real-life versions of Squid Game—without the part about fighting to the death. And the highly violent dystopian thriller isn’t just a commercial hit. Squid Game is the first series in a language other than English to receive Screen Actors Guild Awards, including for two of the central stars, Lee Jung-jae and Hoyeon.

I’ve often joked that I turn to Korean shows and films when I’m trying to feel less dead inside, except that it might not be much of a joke: It could just be that I’m reviving myself with potent medicine I require. When I watch Korean productions, I am more likely to weep, yell, rejoice, mourn, and laugh. But even for a Korean drama, Squid Game is shot through with high emotion. I watched the nine-episode series over the course of 24 hours, pausing only for pesky tasks like work and sleep. I forgot to eat. At times, I forgot to breathe.

Emotional upheaval has always been central to Hwang’s vision. The series begins with its protagonist, Gi-hun, heading to a horse track to place some bets, and what ensues is a sequence of ill-considered decisions and heart-gripping crises. (Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen the first season.) Hwang is fascinated by the idea of gambling, because when people gamble, their façades fall away and they’re left with “very pure emotions, whether it be despair, anger, or joy.” He knows the series is “at a very extreme end of the spectrum” when it comes to showcasing raw feelings. That’s precisely what he wanted to explore.

Almost everybody recruited for the bloody, terrifying arenas of Squid Game elects to compete for the cash because they’re desperate. The three main characters, for instance, are in utter distress: There’s Gi-hun, the obsessive gambler and former autoworker, who’s heavily in debt and unable to pay for the urgent medical care his mother needs. There’s his childhood best friend, the ambitious Sang-woo, who stole money from clients, invested it, then lost it and is now on the run from the law. And there’s Sae-byeok, a North Korean defector who needs money to reunite with her family.

Hoyeon, the model and actor who plays Sae-byeok, won that SAG Award for what is, remarkably, her first acting role. She tells me that Hwang focused on the smallest nuances of her performance, even down to the level of individual syllables in the dialogue. The director would often give revised scripts to the cast the day before shooting. He’d apologize for the timing—and quantity—of his changes, but Hoyeon says the actors were grateful to him: “It was proof that the director was really just incessantly wrestling with the best way to portray these characters.” Asked for an example of a key last-minute change, Park Hae-soo, who plays the embezzling, treacherous Sang-woo, remembers a pivotal moment when, as his character is dying, he stretches his hand toward his former best friend, Gi-hun. “That wasn’t in the script,” says Park. “It was a late adjustment, and I believe the director made that change because he wanted the character to show a glimpse of something human inside himself.”

Lee, who plays the gambling addict Gi-hun, says the cast and crew developed a great deal of trust in one another: “It was a very special group of people to work with. And I say that as someone who has been on many, many sets before.” (Lee has been one of the most celebrated actors in Korea for 30 years, and his SAG Award is the latest in a long string of honors.) “Yeah, and I think another key to our teamwork would be drinking together a lot,” Hoyeon adds, laughing. Lee has said that Gi-hun might be the most difficult role he’s inhabited. The character is complicated and ever-shifting. He starts out as a kind of “fool,” as director Hwang puts it. In time, he changes, but Lee says that an abiding and essential part of Gi-hun’s character is his anger at injustice. The actor thought in depth about how to portray that “over and over” with different levels of rage, as Gi-hun is provoked by a variety of atrocities.

Rage has likely helped Squid Game resonate worldwide. South Korea’s cumulative household debt, more than $1.5 trillion, now exceeds the country’s annual economic output, and the burden falls more on some people than others. In a time of extensive privation, inequity, disease, fear, and distress, the show’s dystopian premise feels alarmingly plausible. Not long after the release of the series, when 80,000 union workers in South Korea went on strike, many protested in Squid Game costumes and masks.

Hwang’s work has sparked social change before. Outrage over the abuses illuminated in his 2011 movie, The Crucible, eventually led to the National Assembly of South Korea abolishing a statute of limitations for sex crimes against minors and the disabled. That said, some Koreans have raised concerns about the portrayal of women in Squid Game, with a feminist group, Haeil, calling for a boycott of the series for its “exclusively male gaze.” (South Korea has the largest gender wage gap among rich countries and often ranks low on gender equality indices. There’s also a prevalent antifeminist backlash, and women associated with feminism frequently have to contend with intense harassment.) Hwang believes it’s to the good that “people are discussing these issues and having a lot of conversations.”

The director didn’t start making films because he wanted to speak up about social issues, he says. His love of cinema actually inspired his interest in injustice. “My first focus is to create work that’s really going to provide its audience with an immersive experience, a very entertaining experience,” he says. Still, he wants to leave viewers mulling over ideas and issues. When working on a big-budget commercial project, Hwang considers it his responsibility to make sure his work will be profitable for investors while bringing “joy to the biggest audience possible.”

These might be the words that come up most frequently in talking with the director and cast: responsibility and joy. I ask them if they feel added pressure about depicting, and perhaps representing, Koreans to so many people. As a Korean American novelist, I am often afraid that I will somehow let us down with what I write. It can be so inhibiting, I tell them, that I have to try to push it behind me. “I think that’s a source of constant, significant stress,” says Hwang. “I have become this person who, whether I want it or not, represents Korea with whatever I do.” Both he and Park feel this in their personal lives as well. Hwang notes that in Korea, public figures are held to “very, very high moral standards.”

Since Squid Game was her first acting role, Hoyeon’s life might have been affected the most. She had been a prominent model but is now “constantly getting recognized on the streets” and has rapidly become one of the most followed South Korean actors on social media. (During one of our video-call conversations, she exclaims about the cookie and card her L.A. hotel has left in her room. The latter is printed with the Squid Game logo, and she holds it up with delight.) Hoyeon does feel an increased pressure but considers it constructive: “Because honestly, how can one individual represent an entire culture, right?”

Korea’s cultural history has helped make Squid Game possible. Lee in particular is quick to acknowledge this debt, invoking the terms 선배 (pronounced “seun-bae”) and 후배 (“hu-bae”), which roughly mean “elder” and “junior.” The impact of Korean culture, already powerful in much of the world, has lately been growing in the U.S. with Parasite, Minari, Blackpink, The Vengeance Trilogy, BTS, Psy, K-dramas galore, and the new adaptation of the beloved best seller Pachinko. “This is not something I believe I created,” Lee says of the ascendancy of Squid Game. “It was handed to us.” He wants to pass his legacy on to his 후배—that is, to younger actors—and colleagues. “I think a lot about how to share this very special experience that I was lucky enough to have, so that when it happens to them later on, they can do a better job of navigating that space.”

When I ask Hwang how he explains his country’s prominence in global culture, he points out that South Korea is physically cut off from the rest of the world: If you’re traveling by car or train, North Korea stands between you and everywhere else. With 52 million people overspilling a small, isolated piece of land, Hwang says, Koreans have a highly competitive society. Since childhood, he’s heard that he should never just focus on domestic markets. “We have to export, export, export,” he says. “And we have to let Korea be known in the world.”

I tell him that Korean friends and I joke that, as far as we know, it’s possible that no group in the U.S. can beat us for competitiveness—and that this could be both a strength and something of a tragic flaw.

“It’s very stressful,” Hwang says, and I say yes, it is.

Hwang is in the midst of final discussions with Netflix for a second season of Squid Game and anticipates that it could be out by the end of 2023 or 2024. He only has about three pages’ worth of ideas that he plans to turn into a script, so there isn’t much he can say except that there will be more games: “Humanity is going to be put to a test through those games once again.” Gi-hun is definitely coming back. Hwang has mentioned elsewhere that the mysterious Front Man from the first round of games might play more of a role, but this seems like a maybe.

What do the actors themselves hope to see in a second season? “I just want Gi-hun to have a more happy life,” says Hoyeon. Sae-byeok and Sang-woo appear to have died, but Lee hopes that Sae-byeok has a twin sister, and that Sang-woo has actually been whisked away by the game operatives in time to keep him alive, so he can work with Hoyeon and Park again. For his part, Park says his great hope is that Korean shows and movies will reach even more people. But when Hoyeon jokes that she wants an amusement park, with stations for the different games, Park says he wants that too—plus figurines of the cast. Squid Game aside, Hoyeon is considering her next steps, and Park is starring in a Korean Netflix remake of the Spanish hit show Money Heist. Lee’s directorial debut, Hunt, will be released this summer.

Asked if the second season of Squid Game will have the same thematic preoccupations, Hwang says, “I want to ask the question, ‘Is true solidarity between humans possible?’ ” Living in this time of global crisis, it’s clear to Hwang that the only way we can overcome the challenges facing our species is with solidarity. Toward the close of the first season, it seemed increasingly possible that, rather than fight to have a single winner, people could have worked together to win as a team. I ask Hwang if he’d had that message in mind. He says he wanted to leave room for this interpretation, but since the characters in the game were “focused on wanting to kill each other off,” they weren’t capable of surviving as a group. He compares it to humanity’s current situation: People seem more like racehorses, just trying to outpace each other.

Hwang believes the outcome could have been different if the Squid Game characters had been able to look outside themselves: “If they were capable of talking with one another, of cooperating with one another, I do agree that there could have been a possibility that we could have seen more winners.”

HAIR, JENNY CHO (HOYEON), SONIA LEE (LEE), MINA PARK (PARK); MAKEUP, SABRINA BEDRANI; GROOMING, SONIA LEE; TAILOR, SHANA ALBERY. PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY ELLIE STILLS. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.