One of Squid Game: The Challenge’s most memorable contestants has claimed Netflix had participants “pretend” to compete during filming.
Squid Game: The Challenge is now streaming on Netflix, with 456 real-life contestants competing to take home the whopping $4.56 million prize.
Five episodes have already been released, seeing contestants compete in many recognizable challenges first seen in the original South Korean TV show — one of those being the iconic Dalgona cookie game.
Now, the Dalgona cookie game’s most memorable contestant has taken to TikTok, claiming “wild” editing played a part in his depiction on the show and alleging Netflix asked players to “pretend” they were competing.
Spencer Hawkings, who took part as contestant number 299, was at the center of the show’s second episode, The Man with the Umbrella. This challenge saw contestants forced to carve out an assigned shape out of a toffee cookie with only the help of a needle. If the cookie broke, they were eliminated.
The four shapes each offered a different level of difficulty, with the umbrella deemed the most undesirable. Having been instructed to form four lines, the first player of each was then brought into a room and told they must decide how the shapes would be split. When the first two groups failed to come to a unanimous agreement, all were eliminated, raising the stakes for those still waiting in turn.
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Ultimately, it was Spencer who took the fall for his line and agreed to pick the umbrella, leaving those left with the tricky challenge less than impressed with his decision. Spencer then had a breakdown on camera, dealing with the guilt of his choice. However, one particular moment saw him seemingly offer a fellow contestant a hilarious look after they broke their cookie.
According to Spencer though, there was more to the “funny” moment than what producers depicted; “Only one-fourth of the room was actually competing a time. The other three-fourths were asked to pretend and just move their fingers around like they were working on a cookie. I was doing a bad job pretending and just watching others try to compete — that’s what was going on in this moment.”
Despite his emotional time on the show, Spencer has also since come out and stood by his decision to pick the umbrella, shutting down any insinuations that he had been “bullied” into choosing it.
“I think I already ultimately made that decision before I walked into the room and you can see that when I started crying… because ultimately I wasn’t going to put the decision of picking umbrella onto anyone else.”
Squid Game: The Challenge Batch 1 (Episodes 1-5) is on Netflix now, while Batch 2 (Episodes 6-9) arrives on November 29.