Netflix’s Squid Game is pulling in viewers left and right – even the most unlikely of billionaires. In fact, it's slated to outpace Bridgerton and Stranger Things for the biggest debut month ever in the streaming platform’s history. The premise of the show is simple enough: debtors are cherrypicked to compete in traditional Korean childhood games, with a deadly twist. The trickiest game of them all (or at least one of them)? The dalgona candy challenge. And the actors involved have reunited to hilariously attempt the feat in real time while also answering questions about the hit show.
In case you didn't know yet, dalgona candy (sometimes referred to as Korean honeycomb, which is a tiny Easter egg hint in the story) is made out of melted sugar and baking soda. The players in Squid Game are forced to carve out delicate shapes in the treat in a short amount of time or, well, they'll be shot point-blank in the head. (Those Saw and Hunger Games comparisons don't really do the brutality and gore of the show justice.) You would think the stars of the streamer's wildly popular Korean doom fest would be as good as you can get at the challenge by now... Watch below to see how they fare (or simply keep reading on):
Technically, many of Squid Game’s stars are already legends over in Korea, such as Lee Jung-jae and Wi Ha-joon. But the beauty of Netflix has been its ability to broaden its reach to foreign audiences and even bring some notoriety to lesser-known talents. While chiseling away at dalgona candy, many actors articulated that their social media following grew substantially. Jung Ho-yeon, who played Kang Sae-byeok (aka the North Korean defector) gained almost 15 million new followers on Instagram in the two weeks since Squid Game premiered. She said during the challenge:
It's quite chaotic. So many things happened in such a short period of time.
When reflecting on all of the series' various deadly competitions, the cast was agreed on which one was the hardest for them as actors. And no, it wasn't the dalgona candy challenge. The cast considers that a cake-walk (candy walk?) in comparison to the jaw-dropping tug-of-war game. Actress Kim Joo-ryoung (aka the slightly annoying Han Mi-nyeo) revealed:
Tug-of-war. That was the hardest because we were doing it against a machine, not a group of people. So no matter how hard we pulled, nothing happened.
Though I didn't think the cast was literally facing off on a 100-foot platform about to plunge to their deaths, it's still funny to learn they were really competing against no one at all. Apparently, though, filming was still very difficult for some of it stars. 27-year-old Jung Ho-yeon was only ever a model before she joined their ranks and was plagued with a lot of insecurities over getting her role. She said:
We walked at night after the shoot and I cried, saying that my acting isn't good enough, but they comforted me and said nice things.
It's beautiful that the Squid Game cast are actually as close in real life as they made us fans think they were on the show. Hopefully, a second season is on the way to fully realize the creator’s ideas. Oh and, by the way, all of the cast failed the dalgona candy challenge. So in theory, they would be all be dead right now. And so would I, probably.
