In the English dub, Ga-yeong and Young-hee (the giant doll in "Red Light, Green Light") are both voiced by Reagan To.
In the French dub, Emmanuel Curtil voices both Hwang In-ho and the salesman.
Happens a lot in the Indonesian dub.
Nanang Kuswanto voices both Jun-ho and VIP #4 (who is fully dubbed in this version, as opposed to others where he keeps his original voice)
Muhammad Azhari voices both Oh Il-nam and Jung Min-tae.
M. Irfan B. Setiawan voices Ali Abdul, the salesman and VIP #3.
Lady Carmelita Novita voices both Ga-Yeong and Han Mi-nyeo.
Agus Mahesa voices Byeong-gi and No Sang-hun, as well as players 021, 196 and 250.
Siwi Dwi Iswanti voices both the announcer and player 209.
Tetty Iswanti voices both Gi-hun's mother and Ji-yeong.
Bambang Riyanto voices the masked manager, as well as players 244 and 278.
Sofia Farida voices player 453, Sang-woo's mother and Kang Cheol.
Darmawan Susanto voices VIP #1 as well as the triangle soldier who is interrogated and killed by Jun-ho.
Acting in the Dark: The models who played the "living furniture" in the VIP room were not told what show they were filming.
All-Star Cast: The Mexican Spanish dub is pretty unusual for many reasons: The cast is filled with many young and veteran voice actors alike, including Víctor Ugarte (Seong Gi-hun), Oscar Flores (Cho Sang-woo), Jose Arenas (Jang Deok-su), Arturo Mercado (Player 001), Luis Fernando Orozco (Ali Abdul), José Gilberto Vilchis (Byeong-gi), along many others to list here. The unusual part came for two reasons: Netflix rarely dubs non-Western live-action media to other languages other than English (and in that case, it doesn't always happen, either), and the fact that Korean dramas and live-action films use either amateurs, barring a few well-known actors for the leads, or voice actors from South America. This is basically one of the few Korean shows, and a big one to boot, featuring a cast of well-known voice actors, a privilege normally reserved for either Western shows, films, or Japanese Anime.
The most likely reason for the change is that the Brazilian Portuguese word for "squid" is "lula", a homonym of Lula da Silva, a then-former president who was on his way to another presidential candidacy at the time of the show's airing. Brazilian politics is heavily divided between haters and lovers of Lula, neither of which would like the literal translation "Lula game" (the latter for his association with such gore and violence, the former for their dislike of Lula da Silva in general).
The grand prize is $456,000 rather than 45.6 billion won (the USD equivalent of which comes out to around $36.1 million).
Players all have a bag of fluid strapped to them that bursts upon elimination, representing a gunshot wound.
For Honeycomb, players will not know which shape they had gotten until they have split into the four groups, since a lot of people here presumably watched the show and would know what the games are, and would all line up to pick the triangle, which is the easiest shape to extract.
Everyone who made it past the first round won $2,000 regardless of whether they won or not. Those who lost the first round at least received $1,000 as compensation for a disastrous day of filming that happened behind the scenes, along with everyone else.
A consolation prize was offered to reduce the pool of players to exactly 120 for tug-of-war to replace the Prison Riot that happened in the series.
Tug-of-war here is much safer, with a foam pit for the losing team to fall into. It is also decided via a flag on the center of the rope rather than just which team falls off the platform.
Rather than letting players choose their partner for Marbles, their partners have already been selected for them, pairing each player with one that they have gotten closest to up to that point, a.k.a. their "best friends". Again, this is because the players would likely know they'd be playing against whoever they partnered up with.
Ddakji was used to further reduce the remaining pool of players down to 16.
The order for players to move in Glass Stepping Stones is completely random (unless a player is able to read numbers in Korean or hazard a guess based on the complexity of the Hangul symbols). An off-screen rule also stated that players with lower numbers can nominate a pool of players to go ahead of them for a few steps (and vice versa, if the higher-numbered player survives) in order to prevent the lower-numbers from having no chance of winning, which could lead to them blocking the way forward and anticlimactically ending the video with no winner. Players also leave their shoes on while playing, and trap doors are used instead of glass panels. Similarly to tug-of-war, there is a foam pit below the bridge.
The last game has been replaced with musical chairs, due to the fact that nobody knows how to playthe actual titular Squid Game.
A non-murderous version of the game is also promoted by the Korean Cultural Center in Abu Dhabi.
Then Netflix ended up creating Squid Game: The Challenge themselves due to the popularity of the original show as a real-life Game Show version of Squid Game.
Ali's actor, Anupam Tripathi, was offered a mat for his climactic leap in the first episode during rehearsals and filming so that he wouldn't get injured. As mentioned in this video, he refused it for a few takes, wanting the actual feel of what it would be like to crash to the ground while literally running for your life.
The tug-of-war scene was filming with the players having to pull against a machine, so their struggling and grunting was real.
The fifth game's glass bridge was stationed 1.5 meters (5 feet) above ground and contained real tempered glass panels that would actually fall off when stepped on. Even if the fall is much shorter than what's shown in the final product, the actors were still terrified crossing the bridge.
South Korean Jung Ho-yeon plays the North Korean Kang Sae-byeok.
Indian Anupham Tripati plays the Pakistani Ali Abdul.
Player 276 is stated to be Pakistani like Ali, but is portrayed by Filipino Christian Lagahit.
The English-speaking Michael Davis (his exact nationality hasn't been published yet) plays the Chinese VIP No. 6 (the stag-masked VIP).
Mid-Development Genre Shift: The series was originally supposed to be a movie, but the showrunners felt that a 120-minute runtime would not be enough to juggle all the storylines and characters involved, so it was expanded instead into a 9-episode TV series.
No Stunt Double: The cast had to perform their own stunts for the most part. That's why some of the elderly cast members were allowed to sit out for them, like with Player 453.
Prop Recycling: The toy band featured at the end of the first episode was reused from Hwang Dong-hyuk's past film Miss Granny.
Real-Life Relative: In the Mexican Spanish dub, Arturo Mercado voices Il-nam, while his son, Arturo Mercado Jr., voices the Salesman. Meanwhile, real-life siblings Alejandro and Luis Fernando Orozco voice detective Hwang Jun-Ho and Ali Abdul, respectively.
Countless people became interested in making dalgona (honeycomb) candy and trying out the game associated with it after it was featured as the basis for the second game. In fact, the street vendor who provided the candy used in the show got swamped with orders after the show's popularity.
Sales for the white sneakers worn by the players spiked 7800% after the show premiered.
Saved from Development Hell: Creator and director Hwang Dong-hyuk first pitched the script ten years prior to the show's release. His pitch had been rejected at the time for being "too grotesque and too unrealistic", and he believes that classist issues coming more to the cultural forefront as time went on is what eventually led to Netflix greenlighting the show. Prior to the show being picked up, Hwang had been a Starving Artist and at one point had to sell his $675 laptop to make ends meet.
Serendipity Writes the Plot: Player 453 is Killed Offscreen during the "Glass Stepping Stones" game because filming the scene required the actors to legitimately fall 1.5 meters onto a crash pad. As Player 453 was played by an older actress, she could not safely perform the stunt.
Sleeper Hit: The show wasn't promoted much by Netflix outside of Asia at first, but it quickly became a breakout hit upon release because of its simple but suspenseful premise and interesting characters, to the point that it's now Netflix's most watched show ever. In fact, Netflix revealed that the show was seen by 111 million viewers within a month of release. Additionally, the show has earned Netflix, as of mid-October, more than $891 million. Not bad for a series with a budget of around 2% of that ($21.4 million).
For Jung Ho-yeon as Kang Sae-byeok. Prior to this series, she only worked as a model. Instantly after the show gained popularity, she got more than 10 million new Instagram followers overnight, and was also made a global ambassador for Louis Vuitton.
The Instagram account of Anupam Tripathi (Ali Abdul's actor) went from 10,000 to over 2.5 million followers in the days after the series' release.
A minor example with Geoffrey Giuliano, the actor of VIP 4. While he was already known by older generations in his home country for his biographies of The Beatles and being the first actor of Ronald McDonald in McDonald's advertisements, his role in the series has led to numerous younger viewers to discover him for the first time.
When Gi-hun crashes into Sae-byeok while trying to flee the loan sharks, the moment of him still quickly trying to salvage and return her spilled coffee was ad-libbed by Lee Jung-jae. Even though this scene was an outtake, the director thought it was too good not to use because it showed that Gi-hun is still a good person at heart. In that same scene, Sae-byeok can be seen with her head down afterwards — because her actress Jung Ho-yeon is actually trying to hide her laughter.
Lee Jung-jae had also insistently requested the added scene of Gi-hun feeding and playing with a stray cat to further establish the character is a good guy at heart despite his rough exterior.
Sang-woo preparing to commit suicide but then putting his suit jacket back on was something the director Hwang Dong-hyuk improvised on the spot, as he believed Sang-woo would want to die "in his most perfect state".
During the Tug-of-War game, one person on the team opposing Gi-hun's team had their shoe fall off when the team fell down after Sang-woo's improvisational trick (you can see the discarded shoe and the person's bare foot), and it was kept in to show that the opposing team had been completely thrown off by this, leading to their deaths.
Tuckerization: Many of the characters' names are taken from Hwang Dong-hyuk's family and friends, with Jun-ho and In-ho taking their surname from Hwang himself. They were naturally quite amused to suddenly find their names all over such a smash hit show.
What Could Have Been: A more subdued example, but Geoffrey Giuliano (the actor for VIP #4, as well as a published writer) tried to insist to the writers to let him and the other American actors edit the scripts for the VIPs, as their delivery and lines were presented as awkward and hollow because they were clearly written by people whose first language was not English. His request was rejected, and what we got (for better or worse) was the result.
Working Title: The series was originally titled Round Six, partly to indicate that there are six games involved and because Netflix was concerned that international audiences would most likely not be aware of the original Korean game.
Write What You Know: Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk wrote the series based on his experiences of being a Starving Artist, as well as living in the hypercapitalist and economically unequal South Korean society.
is never said in the series at all, but it has been widely circulated as a meme.