‘Squid Game: The Challenge’ Player Spencer Hawkins Talks About Breaking Down In Cookie Competition: “I Felt Physically Sick”

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SPOILER ALERT: Do not read unless you’ve seen the first five episodes of Squid Game: The Challenge on Netflix. Anyone who’s tuned into Netflix’s exhilarating reality show version of Squid Game was no doubt moved by the plight of Spencer Hawkins, aka Player 299 — the poor dude whose team got stuck with having to extricate umbrellas in the Dalgona cookie challenge.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Hawkins said his decision to join Squid Game: The Challenge was actually based on how he was a cancer survivor, not that he was obsessed with the South Korean thriller that dropped on Netflix in 2021. “I wasn’t a diehard fan,” he admitted. “The biggest reason I signed up for the show was a few years ago I recovered from cancer, and with that I became much more intentional about the things I wanted in my life, meaning deep human connections and unique experiences.

This show provided me the opportunity to be able to meet new people and to be able to hopefully win money to be able to take care of the people I care about.” But when he became leader of a team that had to embark on the cookie challenge — in which players must extract a circle, triangle, star or umbrella from a honeycomb cookie without breaking the whole dang thing — Hawkins was racked with anxiety and nausea. “It was a demanding day,” he said. “After the decision being made for which cookie shape we each get, it took a few hours for different groups to be able to compete, and so I had to be separated from my line for a time before I was even able to come back to them.

In that time I was trying to get into the mental headspace to be able to prepare for the game, drinking lots of water while trying to save up spit in my mouth, so I was getting physically