T.O.P as Choi Su-bong or “Thanos” in “Squid Game” season 2. Image: Courtesy of Netflix Korea
“Squid Game” season 2 isn’t exactly built for laughs, but it serves up plenty of secondhand embarrassment through one singular force: Thanos or Player 230, played by former K-pop star Choi Seung-hyun — better known as rapper T.O.P of BigBang.
Named after the Marvel villain, this purple-haired menace wastes no time establishing himself as a chief antagonist. High on pills stashed in his cross pendant, he pushes fellow contestants to their deaths during “Red Light, Green Light.” But unlike season one’s brutally efficient Deok-su, this villain operates purely in the realm of the bizarre.
Thanos plays more clown than criminal, a walking parody of wannabe rapper stereotypes turned up to eleven. He punctuates threats with random English (and, in at least one instance, Spanish, “Senorita!”), drops impromptu rap verses mid-conversation, and struts through deadly games like he’s shooting a music video.
His dialogue seems precision-engineered for maximum cringe, a Gen Z caricature on steroids who, with the help of drugs, treats life-or-death situations like an extended audition for a hip-hop reality show.
The casting carries its own loaded history, one that straddles fiction and reality. Choi’s career imploded in 2017 after he was caught smoking pot with a K-pop trainee. Though it was marijuana, rather than harder drugs, it was a scandal that led to swift cancellation in Korea’s zero-tolerance entertainment industry.
After a 10-month suspended sentence and a demotion to public service duty, he largely disappeared from view. His only public appearance came during BigBang’s brief 2022 reunion, after which he reportedly cut ties with his former bandmates.
His surprise casting in the Netflix smash hit sparked heated debate even before release, with critics questioning the ethics of featuring a drug offender and Choi’s acting skills, given his previously mixed reviews in films like “Commitment” and “Tazza: The Hidden Card.”
But director Hwang Dong-hyuk came to his defense again and again. “He was the best person for the role,” Hwang told local media in November, praising Choi’s “courage” in accepting the part.
Indeed, sometimes playing yourself — or rather, society’s worst caricature of you — takes more courage than playing someone else entirely, and the response since Thursday’s premiere has been split along cultural lines.
Korean media and social platforms have uniformly savaged both the performance and the casting decision, mixing criticism of Choi’s acting with moralizing commentary. One reviewer from a major local newspaper asked pointedly: “The director speaks of (Choi’s) courage, but what courage?”
International viewers, however, saw something different, a meta-commentary and a self-reflexive statement on Korea’s stringent drug laws and notoriously unforgiving attitude toward drug use.
“I know how much he got from South Korean media from marajuana use… This role is a huge ‘f you’ to them,” one Reddit user noted, while another praised Choi for “beating the druggie heat by acting as a druggie in one of the biggest series in the world.”