The filming of Netflix’s reality series “Squid Game: The Challenge” took place in the United Kingdom, a departure from the original “Squid Game” series which was set in South Korea.
The primary filming location was Wharf Studios in Barking, London. This state-of-the-art production facility boasts six large-scale custom-design sound stages, spanning a 10-acre campus with 200,000 square feet of creative space.
Significant effort was put into recreating the iconic sets from the original series at Wharf Studios.
This included the pastel-pink staircases and a massive room full of bunk beds where contestants stayed. The bunkbed structures alone required 20 tons of steelwork and were used for most of the filming, which lasted 16 days.
A notable part of the series, the Red Light, Green Light game, was filmed at Cardington Studios in Bedford. These studios, previously home to the UK’s largest aircraft, provided a vast space necessary for the scale of this game. The set for this game was impressively large, measuring 100 meters by 40 meters, and over 100,000 square feet in size.
The level of detail in the sets was so high that even the series creator and director Hwang Dong-hyuk expressed admiration, jokingly noting the need to top these sets in the second season of the original show.
He was joined on set by Anupam Tripathi, who played Ali Abdul in the original series, wearing the same green tracksuit as the reality show contestants.
These filming locations in the UK offered the necessary scale and facilities to create an immersive experience that replicated the intense and distinctive environment of the original “Squid Game” series. The show premiered on Netflix on November 22.
