🇰🇷 Hwang Dong-hyuk

He was born on May 26, 1971, in Seoul, raised in a tight-knit, working-class family. He studied communications at Seoul National University and then took the slightly unusual step of moving to the United States for an MFA in film at the University of Southern California. His thesis short, Miracle Mile, won an honorable mention at the Student Academy Awards in 2005. He returned to Korea, by his own description, broke and full of ideas.

His feature debut, My Father (2007), a quiet drama about a Korean adoptee from the United States who returns to find his birth father on death row, became, against expectations, a moderate hit. The Crucible (2011), based on the journalist Gong Ji-young's novel about real sexual-abuse cases at a school for deaf children in Gwangju, was the breakthrough. It earned five million admissions, prompted a national outcry, and led directly to a revision of Korean child-protection law — a legislative effect attributed almost entirely to a film, which is, in any country, a remarkable thing for a film to do.

Miss Granny (2014), a body-swap comedy in which a 74-year-old grandmother wakes up in her own 20-year-old body, was the commercial high. It crossed eight million admissions, became the highest-grossing comedy in Korean history at release, and spawned seven international remakes (Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Japanese, Filipino, Spanish-language). The Fortress (2017), a 17th-century war epic, was prestigious; The Crucible had been important; Miss Granny had paid the bills. None of them, individually or together, prepared him for what came next.

Squid Game was greenlit by Netflix in 2019 after a decade of rejection, expanded by Hwang from its original feature script into a nine-episode series, and shot through the pandemic. He has said in interviews that he lost six teeth from stress during the production. He wrote and directed every episode himself, a workload that is now legendary inside the industry. The result, when it launched on September 17, 2021, was a single-creator hit on a scale that the medium had not really seen before. Within 28 days, more than 142 million households had watched; by 2022, 1.65 billion viewing hours had accumulated. It won six Primetime Emmys, including Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series — the first non-English-language win in that category.

He almost did not write a second season. He has spoken openly, and unusually for a Korean creator, about the toll of the first one — the financial unfairness of the deal he signed in 2019 (which had no streaming bonus structure), the stress fractures, the loss of teeth, the difficulty of returning to a story he had finished. He renegotiated, expanded into a Squid Game cinematic universe, and released the second season in December 2024 and the third in late 2025. The critical response was strong, the audience figures astronomical, and Hwang, by then, had become the highest-paid showrunner in Asia.

Outside the show, he has produced new work through his Firstman Studio and, in 2024, set up a multi-year first-look deal with Netflix. He is developing, by report, a stand-alone feature about a 1980s Korean democratic uprising. He lives in Seoul with his daughter, whom he raises alone, and is, in person, exactly as one might guess — quiet, slightly tired, drily funny, and unflinchingly clear about what his fame has cost.

He has said that Squid Game's most important political project was to make people, briefly, see one another. In a world that mostly does not, this is a useful thing for a man to have tried.