A superstar cameo, David Fincher and America: Is Squid Game really over?
Squid Game 's finale was packed with twists, but perhaps the greatest of them was the cameo by a certain Oscar-winning Australian actor in its final moments.
As the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) drove through Los Angeles in a black limo, he noticed a familiar sight playing out in a back alley: a recruiter for the game challenging some desperate schmuck to ddakji, in which players take it in turns to try to flip a folded paper tile by throwing another tile onto it with great force.
In the Squid Game version, the loser is rewarded with a stinging slap to the face. And in this instance, the person doing the slapping is Cate Blanchett.
That could mean nothing more than that the two-time Oscar winner is a fan of the series or had a day free in her busy schedule and so agreed to film the uncredited cameo. Or it could mean something far more substantial: that the long-rumoured American spin-off, with David Fincher reportedly directing, is about to become reality.
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Series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has insisted that this third season would be the last. 'I am thrilled to see the seed that was planted in creating a new Squid Game grow and bear fruit through the end of this story,' he said in a letter to fans a year ago, as season two was about to launch.
The streamer's blog site, Tudum, has this week reiterated that the director had 'created Squid Game 's goodbye season to give fans the resounding closure they deserve'.
But with the show having grown far beyond the self-contained single season Hwang had originally planned, to become one of Netflix's most significant pieces of original intellectual property (with a reality show, chat shows and making-of specials to pad out the library), you'd be mad to bet against a spin-off or two.
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