Fans around the world were ready for some big twists from the series finale of Netflix‘s smash-hit dystopian thriller Squid Game — but arguably no one saw this surprise coming (warning: spoilers ahead).
In the final moments of the show’s last episode, the Squid Game universe suddenly gets a whole lot more global, when the camera jumps to California to find a character played by none other than two-time Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett on the streets of Los Angeles, recruiting potential American players to enter a U.S. version of the show’s eponymous death game.
The brief moment provides an instant answer to the widespread industry speculation about how Netflix would continue, or create a spinoff for its most globally popular show of all time. For now, all we know is that a new American storyline for the hit Korean series has been seeded. More details about what Blanchett’s cameo portends for the future of the Squid Game franchise — who will direct the new U.S. season, who else will star, and how involved will series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk be — can be expected from Netflix in the weeks and months ahead. In the meantime, Squid Game fans across the globe have a whole new death and drama-packed season to digest.
Netflix dropped all six episodes of the final, third season of Squid Game at midnight on Friday, Pacific Time, just six months after the premiere of the second season late last year. Adding a few dozen more deaths to the harrowing but candy-colored show’s already enormous kill count, Season 3 brought the curtain down on the story of protagonist Gi-Hun (Lee Jung-jae), as the everyman hero made his final face-off against the game’s dark overseer, The Front Man (Lee Byung-hun). The season had plenty of surprises besides Oscar-winning actresses, too — most notably the inclusion of an innocent newborn infant as contestant in the game, an upping of the show’s anti-capitalist moral stakes to their logical extreme.
The original season of the Korean dystopian drama shocked the world after its debut on Netflix in September 2021, rapidly becoming the streamer’s most-watched show ever, and later winning a pair of Emmys for its creator and star. The first season’s unprecedented success heaped enormous pressure on series creator Hwang, who famously writes and directs every episode of the show singlehandedly. But season two nonetheless delivered, setting a record for the most views of a series or film on Netflix in its premiere week, and eventually rising to become the streamer’s third most popular show of all time.
The casting of Blanchett lends instant artistic heft to whatever comes next for Squid Game. The Australian actress has been nominated for eight Academy Awards and won twice (for Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator and Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine), and also been nominated for two Emmys (Mrs. America) and won four Golden Globes from 13 nominations. She’s also known for picking her artistic collaborators carefully and tends to only work with top auteurs. Recent roles include the leads in Alfonso Cuaron’s critically acclaimed Apple TV+ series Disclaimer, Todd Fields’ Tár, Guy Maddin’s Rumors and Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag.
