Squid Game’s lethal games conquer the public once again. The show, after the release in December 2024 of the second season of the series, created, written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk, stands at the top of the Netflix rankings as the most watched ever: after just 4 days of airing , the first episodes of the new chapter have reached 68 million views, and the numbers continue to rise. In the seven new episodes, the return of the beloved protagonist Seong Gi-hun was much appreciated, dealing with a new sequence of deadly games that see the players, once again, only as pawns. Among the new characters, however, we find Thanos, whose real name (still in the series) is Choi Su-bong, a former rapper with purple hair and many drug problems.
Thanos, who is player 230 of Squid Game 2: all about the actor
Player 230, this is Thanos’ number in the show, is dividing the audience of Squid Game 2. Fans of the series see him for the first time when everyone wakes up in the main room: his real name is Choi Su-bong and he is a rapper with drug problems, there due to a debt of over a billion won. Trial after trial, Thanos finds himself facing the other players and is even recognized by one of them, thus revealing to the others that he is a rapper who came second in The Rap Battleground. After the first steps, Su-bong tries to form a crew with his best friend Nam-gyu (Player 124), and during the game Six-Legged Pentathlon he teams up with Nam-gyu, Se-mi (Player 380), Park Min-su (Player 125) and Gyeon-su (Player 256), completing the Jegi test.
The character’s past incredibly mirrors that of the actor who plays him, Choi Seung-hyun, better known as TOP, former member of the K-pop boyband BigBang. In 2017 the singer was banned from the Korean recording industry after being arrested for using marijuana (illegal in South Korea) and sentenced to ten months in prison and a two-year suspension from compulsory military service. “As you may know, actor Seung-hyun, about nine years ago was involved in a marijuana scandal in Korea and has not been able to do any projects for the past nine years. And so this is a return after a long break, and it’s a special thing because he plays a character who is a rapper and also someone who uses drugs,” Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk explained to People, adding: “I think it took a lot of courage for him, in a way, to play a character, especially someone who shares a lot of similarities that are quite negative for him as a person.”
