The Recruiter’s Squid Game Return Hits Hard

Spoilers follow for the first episode of the second season of Squid Game. 

Life is full of contradictions, like how Squid Game made Gong Yoo slapping ddakji losers in the face both a visceral representation of the central game’s depravity and also something that, well, a lot of people wanted him to do to them, too. Such was the brilliance of casting a man who looks like that as the game’s Recruiter, a role that required him to smile in people’s faces while also telling them how feral, grotesque, and undeserving of happiness they really are. He’s hot, charismatic, and deranged, qualities Gong Yoo brandishes with a precision as razor-sharp as that jawline. And before the second season premiere reduces our favorite handsy villain to just another body on the ground, “Bread and Lottery” is a hell of a showcase for the man Squid Game used as both its salesman and its seducer.

Unlike Squid Game’s other baddies, who wear masks and lie about their identities, the Recruiter is comparatively upfront. He has to be, to gain the contestants’ trust; why would such a handsome and self-assured and well-dressed man steer them wrong? In the series’s first season, the Recruiter is a microcosm of the game itself: an offered opportunity that seems harmless at first, until the situation reveals a violent edge the people playing the game feel like they have no choice but to abide by. He is an introduction to the game’s escalating brutality and sliver-thin chances of success, all delivered with a polished head tilt and glassy vacant stare; he’s Patrick Bateman haunting Seoul’s subway stations, stalking the woebegone and handing out paper cards of an impressively substantial weight. The Recruiter might not wield a chainsaw, but he sure cranks his arm back when delivering those slaps.

The cruelty of those strikes, and the satisfaction it gives the Recruiter to deliver them, hint at a core sadism for the character that the second season premiere picks up and runs wild with. When we meet Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) again, he’s spent the years since he won the game — and vowed to destroy it — searching for the Recruiter, first settling his debts with his loan shark Mr. Kim (Kim Pub-lae), and then hiring Mr. Kim and his surrogate son and second-in-command Woo-Seok (Jeon Seok-ho) to coordinate teams of men scouring the subway stations. Not every man working for Gi-hun believes in what he’s told them about the Recruiter. Some of them consider the 2D sketch of him that Mr. Kim and Woo-Seok passed out, and the mannequin they set up in their headquarters, as manifestations of a mythical boogeyman. Maybe that’s why Gong Yoo’s return as the character hits all the harder: With its montages of Gi-hun’s employees roaming through empty platforms and failing to find the man who first lured him to the game, “Blood and Lottery” almost convinces us that the Recruiter was a figment of our fears — until his demented reappearance.

Just like when Bateman unravels at the end of American Psycho, Gong Yoo revives the Recruiter as a funhouse-mirror reflection of his former self. He’s less slick and more abrupt, incrementally progressing those qualities until he’s all-out unhinged. Each of his daily activities reiterates the black-and-white nature of the game’s worldview, and Gong Yoo’s performance works so well within those limitations because he careens between offering people hope and hopelessness. When Mr. Kim and Woo-Seok trail the Recruiter to a park, we watch him extend to dozens of destitute people either a bread roll or a lottery ticket. As he approaches person after person with this same wager and the majority of them pick the scratcher rather than food, Gong Yoo keeps the smile on his face wide and rigid, while his eyes are flinty and judgmental. His voice may be pleasant when he asks for his coin back after they use it to scratch their (always losing) lottery ticket, but there’s a tension to his body language when he’s left with tons of unclaimed bread after a loop of the whole park.

Gong Yoo lets that restlessness boil over when the Recruiter deliberately calls for everyone’s attention, spills the leftover food on the ground, and then destroys it while yelling, “You made your choice. I’m not the one who threw these away. It’s you, ladies and gentlemen.” He grinds the bread under the heels of his polished shoes, he jumps up and down, he kicks and smashes and obliterates. It’s a temper tantrum as a misconceived teaching moment, and Gong Yoo amplifies the lapse in the Recruiter’s self-control. After all the screaming fervor and physical exertion of that freakout, he rearranges his suit, smooths back his hair, and slaps a smile back on his face. The little “Hm” he makes when surveying the mess he’s made is supposed to be an expression of surprise, but Gong Yoo plays the scene with such contradictory ferocity and discipline that we understand this is a routine, the only uncertainty being the specifics of how many people choose the meal versus the gamble. This degradation of others mixed with unknowable randomness is what the Recruiter lives for, and our baseline knowledge about what gets him going fuels the increasing horror of his actions in the back half of “Bread and Lottery.”

Series creator, writer, and director Hwang Dong-hyuk turns the episode into a locked-door genre piece, with the Recruiter overpowering Mr. Kim and Woo-Seok and forcing them to play a game of rock, paper, scissors, minus one, in addition to Russian roulette, so that the loser of the first game also has to risk shooting themselves in the head during the second game. As the Recruiter watches over them, calmly sharing their increasingly low odds of survival as they sob, he remains impassive and unmoved, even after killing Mr. Kim for (purposefully) cheating so that Woo-Seok could live. It’s only when the Recruiter ends up with the older man’s blood and viscera on his face that, as at the park, he shifts into a looser, reckless gear, as if the act of denying someone something — food, life, a second chance — is what shatters his polished outer shell and activates his gleeful inner indecency. The Recruiter’s suaveness has always been a front, and when he immediately tracks down Gi-hun, challenges him to another game of Russian roulette, and delivers his baddie origin story, Gong Yoo’s performance ratchets up the senselessness of this all, to emphasize how susceptible we all are to depravity when it’s accompanied by the possibility of financial prosperity.

In the final scenes of “Bread and Lottery,” Gi-hun and the Recruiter’s conversation about the game’s players serves various functions. It’s another chance for Squid Game to get philosophical about the politics of the game and interrogate their inner hierarchy, with Gi-hun sneeringly calling the Recruiter “their dog.” It’s a little glimpse into the sniper-focused subplot of this season, with the Recruiter, his eyes locked onto Gi-hun’s and his posture initially casual, explaining that he started as one of the game’s body-disposal workers, burning “countless people like you … they’re just trash, utterly useless in the world.” Gong Yoo’s chilling smile when he talks about how being given a gun by the game made him feel “like my existence was acknowledged for the first time in my life” is the first time that expression has looked genuine on the Recruiter’s face, and his joking tone as he goads Gi-hun into guessing that he killed his own father during the game is a Bond-villain-level boast.

Gong Yoo makes the Recruiter a figure of unchecked force in this scene, puffed up on memories of his past slaughters and still covered in the remains of his last victim, and his reactions provide this The Deer Hunter-evoking final round of Russian roulette its grotesque power. His casual reloading of the gun, his mad grin as he raises it to his head, his little sigh when he survives each round, his laugh when he calls Gi-hun “a piece of trash who got lucky and made it out of the dumpster,” and his brief look of shock when he realizes Gi-hun has won the game are all unforgettable moments on the path toward the Recruiter’s end. But like a brainwashed employee determined to represent their bosses well, the Recruiter doesn’t die afraid. Gong Yoo’s ferociously savage performance here feels like Bateman’s iconic “Did you know I’m utterly insane?” brought to vivid, macabre life: He breaks into a smile as the “Nessun Dorma” aria reaches a crescendo, confidently puts the gun under his chin, and pulls the trigger, still holding onto the weapon that for so long gave him such self-worth and such seeming invincibility. The Recruiter was our entry point into this world of fatal children’s games, bizarro Willy Wonka aesthetics, and class-based contempt, and his exit is a satisfying final slap in the face.