Who Is Player 001 in ‘Squid Game’ Season 2?

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Squid Game, Season 2.]

Squid Game is back and keeping viewers on their toes as Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) re-entered the game determined to exact revenge for himself and the players who have lost their lives to the deadly playground shenanigans.

After Gi-hun won the titular games, which saw him pitted against hundreds of others with the goal of winning unfathomable riches by surviving the longest, Season 2 picks up with his plan to infiltrate the scheme after two years of training with weapons. While he believes he has infiltrated the games early on in the season, it becomes clear quite quickly that he hasn’t as a tracker hidden in one of his teeth from the time he’s picked up to play and the period leading up to his entrance into the game itself is removed.

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But similar to Season 1, another player is operating with an ulterior motive, and they happen to wear the number 001. So, who is Season 1’s Player 001? It turns out that it’s Hwang In-ho (Lee Byung-hun), a.k.a. The Front Man. He is among Season 7’s players, contributing to the failures and success of different game rounds and gaining the trust of an unsuspecting Gi-hun along the way.

As viewers will recall from Season 1, Hwang In-ho is the older brother of Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), and after he went missing, Hwang Jun-ho went searching for him, infiltrating the workers behind the scenes of the games to try and find him. Ultimately, Hwang Jun-ho discovered that Hwang In-ho had been put in charge of the brutal games when The Front Man removed his mask in Season 1.

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Hwang In-ho won a past iteration of the games as Player 132 and took over Oh Il-nam’s (O Yeong-su) position after the old man and creator (who was Season 1’s Player 001) bowed out of the gig. Ultimately, Hwang In-ho interfered with the game Gi-hun was trying to play this time around, but his true motivations remain partly unclear. For now, he appears to be an adversary, but will he want to exact revenge in a similar way to Gi-hun before the series is through? Only time will tell.

Squid Game, Season 3 Premiere, 2025, Netflix