‘Squid Game: The Challenge’ Contestants On Fearing Death, Practicing Cookie Scratching & Why Eliminated Players Should Quit Whining

deadline.com:

SPOILER ALERT: This story features details from the first five episodes of Squid Game: The Challenge EXCLUSIVE: Squid Game: The Challenge may look like a hyper-saturated fever dream, but for the contestants who plunged themselves into the world of the Korean megahit, it all felt deadly real.

Netflix welcomed 456 members of the public to its lavish reality show reimagining of Hwang Dong-hyuk‘s singular vision. For two players, the recreation was so accurate, it was like stepping into the screen.

Dash Katz (player 141) and Lorenzo Nobilio (161) tell Deadline that they were fans of the show before arriving at the wintery set of Squid Game: The Challenge at Cardington Studios, 50 miles north of London, earlier this year.

Any January blues were quickly blasted away when they came face-to-face with Young-hee, a menacing robotic doll who, in the original Squid Game, literally shoots anything that twitches in the show’s opening game, ‘Red Light, Green Light.’ Death was not an option for Netflix’s reality series, so producers Studio Lambert and The Garden saddled contestants with automated squibs that propelled black ink when they were eliminated. “It definitely exceeded my expectations because the set was so realistic,” says Nobilio, an Italian private equity executive living in London. “It was a fully immersive experience … you actually feel you’re going to die for real.” Dash adds: “When my friends would get eliminated, it would feel like they were really dying.