‘Squid Game’: Seong Gi-hun’s Voice Actor Reveals the Surprising Scene He Found Most Challenging
Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), Player 456 in the Netflix series Squid Game, is voiced by actor Greg Chun. For a series about fighting to survive, Chun says one of his most challenging scenes didn’t involve any of the deadly children’s games played in Squid Game. Find out which scene exhausted the voice actor. Plus, the moments from the show he found most difficult to record.
‘Squid Game’ gambling scenes was exhausting for voice actor Greg Chun
In an interview with Slate, Chun talked about his voice acting experience, which includes video games like Call of Duty. “[Voice acting] takes it out of you,” says Chun. Part of playing a role in Call of Duty requires shouting and mimicking death in “20 different ways.”
“All of them are excruciating,” says the voice actor. “You have to be lit on fire, you have to be electrocuted, you have to have your arm blown off.”
That experience lent itself to the voice acting required in Squid Game. But ironically, those weren’t the most exhausting scenes for Chun. “I think the most vocally stressful thing I had to do for Squid Game was the horse racing scenes,” he says.
In the series, Gi-hun’s gambling addiction often gets the better of him, and is the reason he enters into the Squid Game competition. “That got me more tired and thrashed than any of the other stuff that was going on,” Chun adds. “I screamed myself raw for those.”
Live-action dubbing is ‘really hard’ according to ‘Squid Game’ voice actor
Squid Game quickly became one of the most viral Netflix shows. To date, the series is available with subtitles in 31 languages and live-action dubs in another 13 to make it accessible for many people.
While there has been some controversy surrounding the live-action dubbing of Squid Game, Chun admits how challenging it must have been to translate a nuanced language like Korean. What’s more, Chun says live-action dubbing is much more complex than anime, which is “more forgiving because the detail of the mouth movements and the facial expressions are not really much of an issue.”
With the live-action dubbing in Squid Game, Chun had to voice a living, breathing actor. “You can see every little tick of their eyebrow, every…slight grin, frown, grimace,” he says. “You’re trying to match all of that vocally; there’s a lot to do and pay attention to.” Matching his vocal performance to that of Lee’s was one of the most challenging parts of working on the Netflix series.
‘Squid Game’ presented other challenges for voice actor Greg Chun
Chun also mentions a few other challenges he ran into playing Gi-hun in Squid Game. “Sometimes you may just be talking really fast and the script is scrolling by you on the screen, and you’re trying to keep up with all the words,” he explains.
Other times, Chun was challenged by lines containing minimal words. “When you have fewer words to work with, there’s nothing to hide behind,” he explains. “If you have to say I love you…you have to make that moment real. Which can be harder than a scene where you’re screaming and crying and there’s all sorts of noise.”
Stream all nine episodes of Squid Game on Netflix.
