“Squid Game: The Challenge” casting directors Robyn Kass and Erika Dobrin are unflappable. Even an unforeseen storm wreaking havoc on this journalist’s Wi-Fi didn’t dampen their enthusiasm during an unforgettable week that yielded their first-ever Emmy nominations for casting for a reality program. (“You gotta have patience when you’re casting 456 people!” Dobrin says.)
On the Netflix reality competition—based on Hwang Dong-hyuk’s massively popular, Emmy-winning dystopian thriller—456 contestants vie for a $4.56 million prize. Though it’s modeled on the gruesome original series, in this iteration, players “expire” via exploding ink squibs rather than suffering gory deaths.
Here, Kass and Dobrin explain how they chose the contestants from among the approximately 81,000 people who tried out for the show’s first season.
When you were casting Season 1, did anyone apply who didn’t realize this was a reality show?
Robyn Kass: It was all tongue-in-cheek, but I think every single person just wanted to hear us say, on the record, that there weren’t going to be any deaths on the show. [Laughs]
How many entrants did you see in total?
Erika Dobrin: In the multiple thousands—a lot. It made our job insanely hard.
Credit: Pete Dadds/Netflix
It must have been especially challenging to cast the series without knowing how the narrative would unfold.
ED: You know who your stars are, and you know who [might] play what role. But if they get eliminated in the first five minutes of the show, there goes that story. We could only hope that the stories that we presented in our casting would come to fruition—and a lot of them didn’t. A lot of surprises happened, and it was great.
RK: We had to make sure that every single person we put in front of [Netflix] was worthy of winning and would be entertaining, and that we would be excited about them winning—you know, all the buzzwords that you’ve heard in reality casting. The network gave us the ability to cast anyone and everyone—all ages, shapes, sizes, and backgrounds—which was exciting.
How to Get Cast on ‘Squid Game: The Challenge’ Some contestants, like mother-son duo Leanne Wilcox Plutnicki and Trey Plutnicki, became viewer favorites, while others, like Bryton Constantin, had very polarizing personalities. How could you tell when an applicant had something special?
ED: I interviewed [Trey] first. He was good, but not, like, “Oh, my God!” good. So I asked, “Is there somebody else in your family? A friend, a long-lost cousin?” And he came back with his mom the next day, and I was like, “This is great!” All I can hope then is that they both make it. And Bryton was the kind of villainous guy that we loved. We thought he would be a standout.
Did you know in advance which games would be featured, or did you see the events unfold along with the viewers?
RK: We knew nothing. We didn’t even know what order the games were going to be in. Erika and I were both really proud when we watched it all unfold, remarking on how visually beautiful it was and seeing the games for the first time.
ED: As of now, we’re definitely starting from scratch again. For the first season, the cast had a little more of a benefit because they had seen [the original “Squid Game,”] so they saw some of the games that they could practice, like the Dalgona Cookie and Red Light, Green Light challenges. But we have no idea what will be in this new season. So that’s exciting for us—and for everybody.
This story originally appeared in the Aug. 15 issue of Backstage Magazine.