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Editors note: Heavy spoilers ahead.
One of my favorite moments from the second season of Squid Game was also one of the Korean thriller hit’s most humorous. During episode 5, the remaining 255 contestants in the deadly competition — which turns children’s games into life-or-death scenarios — are playing “Mingle,” which in the U.S. might be described as a deadly version of musical chairs. As a platform turns round and round to the eerie tune of a child’s nursery rhyme, everyone is bracing for their fate. Except for one, Thanos, the season's new villain who’s maniacally skipping around under the influence of some mysterious pills in his pocket. It’s unhinged, hilarious, and a brief moment of much-needed levity. A few episodes later, when he gets stabbed to death in a bathroom, I felt genuinely sad that such a great character to hate had met his demise so early.
Of the new cast of personalities introduced in Squid Game 2, Thanos is the most memorable. An arrogant purple-haired “rapper” who finds his way into the games after losing millions of dollars from crypto trading, he's a villain of exceptional style and gleeful corruption. In the first game of Red Light, Green Light, he purposefully pushes a line of people to their deaths. He’s prone to yelling out random English slang (“yo,” “my boy”) and spitting out ill-timed (and very bad) freestyles. His actor, T.O.P, plays him with an unpredictable edge — which had me glued to the screen for every scene he was in.
It turns out that wasn’t everyone’s experience. A casual Google search after I finished the season showed a slew of articles allegedly citing that T.O.P — a former member of the wildly popular K-pop group Big Bang born Choi Seung-hyun — was receiving major backlash from Korean netizens for his portrayal of the drug-addled maniac. The noise was apparently enough to compel Squid Game director Hwang Dong-hyuk to release a statement defending the actor. On December 28, he told People that he thought T.O.P, “performed very impressively” and that he was “very satisfied with what he did with the character,” and that “it took him a lot of guts” to portray a character that “shares a lot of similarities that are quite negative to him as a person too.”
The similarities between the character of Thanos and the actor portraying him are superficial but notable. In 2017, Choi Seung-hyun was found guilty of using marijuana, an illegal drug in South Korea, during his mandatory military service. He was sentenced to a 10-month suspended jail sentence, and at the time released a statement saying he was “truly sorry” for disappointing his fans and the public, and that he would not “make such a mistake again with what I’ve learned from this lesson,” per South Korean outlet Yonhap. The incident totally derailed his career — he has largely been out of the public eye since — and his appearance in Squid Game 2 was supposed to be his comeback.
The idea of a popular musician being blacklisted for nine years over a marijuana charge will seem absurd to most Western audiences, but the debate over T.O.P's Squid Game role isn't anything new in South Korea. Being caught with drugs — prescribed or not — can be a career-derailing scandal for the country's entertainers: in 2014, 2NE1’s Park Bom was investigated for having Adderall, illegal in South Korea but legal in the United States, where she acquired it through a doctor.
The backlash to T.O.P's performance shows in part the puritanical view on drug use that runs through a large and vocal segment of South Korea, but it also misunderstands the purpose of the performance. Sure, his heavy-handed depiction of Thanos’ addiction definitely had me rolling my eyes once or twice as he greedily downed pills while shaking in the corner. But this is Squid Game, a show about a secret competition held on an island that kills over 400 people as an annual sport for the billionaire class — the entire premise is over the top. His name is Thanos, a literal Marvel villain! The show’s characters are written to be more nuanced than most, but they all still cleanly fall in archetypal classes of good or evil. Thanos is a sociopathic rapper and bully tormented by addiction, and it’s to T.O.P.’s credit that he conveys that so immediately.
In the wake of the criticism, the tide has slowly shifted as people online have begun defending T.O.P’s performance, which has been refreshing to see. The top threads in the Squid Game subreddit are dedicated to Thanos’ antics and comedic relief. Like Jennifer Coolidge’s portrayal of Tanya in The White Lotus, I’ve got a sense T.O.P’s Thanos will attain similar levels of fandom for his cringey lovability — so much so that even though he’s dead, I’m still holding out hope they’ll somehow find a way to bring him back.
