‘Squid Game’ VIP Actor Speaks Out on That Awful English Voiceover

Squid Game season three has been met with decidedly mixed reviews, with most fans rating it as the blockbuster hit’s weakest installment. That ending didn’t help things, but neither did the enhanced presence of the show’s most annoying characters: the billionaire VIPs who spectate the games from behind glass and gilded masks.

Season three saw the group exerting a more active influence on the competition. Early on, they disguise themselves as pink guards and massacre the unfortunate losers during the Hide and Seek game; later, they decide that Player 222’s infant daughter should take her dead mother’s place as a full-on contestant, as impractical and ghoulish as that sounds.

So yeah, we hate these guys, and we’re supposed to hate them. They’re the awful rich people who—when they’re not bantering with insults among themselves—cackle as the players do desperate things to get their hands on the prize money. Then, they cackle even more as the body count rises. In a show that’s already about exploitation and greed, they’re a heavy-handed reminder of just how gross this all is.

But what makes the VIPs even worse? Their voices. In contrast to Squid Game‘s Korean dialogue, the VIPs speak in English, and it’s dubbed so badly it makes their cringe-worthy dialogue even more ghastly. This isn’t a new invention for season three—season one had its share of VIP dubbing disasters—but it’s so much more prominent in season three.

As IGN reports, even the performers who played the VIPs were perplexed by the choice. Responding to a TikTok that took the VIPs to task for being, frankly, terrible performers, actor Bryan Bucco offered an explanation of sorts.

“Those are the English dubs. I was the actual actor. What’s being played here isn’t my voice,” Bucco wrote. He also speculated why Squid Game decided to dub English dialogue that was already being spoken in English.

“I think whoever is contracted to do the dubbing, does ALL of the dubbing. The Korean version shouldn’t have English dubs. If there are some in the Korean version, it would have to be due to specific lines having to be re-recorded for clarity.”

The IGN piece includes some interviews that took place with dub actors after similar complaints were raised about the VIPs in season one. But clearly, Squid Game didn’t make any adjustments for season three in this arena.

It sounds like filming was just as awkward as the finished result. Bucco said the VIP scenes were the last to be shot, and “Every night we sat together reading through lines questioning how any of it should really be said …. It was mostly just us sitting in a room reacting to something that wasn’t there.”

The actor also agreed the VIPs didn’t add much to the story in the end, nodding to a fan’s complaint. “[The VIPs] didn’t further the story or [complement] it well.”

You can watch Squid Game season three on Netflix now. Nobody would blame you for fast-forwarding all the VIP scenes, though, unless you purposefully set out to view them as comic relief.

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