With a winner’s prize of over $4 million, Squid Game: The Challenge players may do almost anything — including using lubricated condoms to moisten their lips.
“I’m going to confirm this: Yeah, that’s 100 percent real,” Trey Plutnicki, player 301, told Entertainment Weekly in an interview published Thursday, November 30.
While some players may have turned to rubbers to keep their mouths moist, Plutnicki wasn’t one of them. “Do you think I did that? Do I seem like a person that did that?” he asked rhetorically. “No, hell no. That’s so stupid.”
The reality series, which premiered earlier this month, is based on the South Korean Squid Game web series created for Netflix. The show revolves around a secret contest where 456 players, all suffering financial hardship, risk their lives to play a series of deadly children’s games.
Like its fictional counterpart, Squid Game: The Challenge also began with 456 contestants from around the world. 259 were eliminated in the Red Light, Green Light game where they attempted to cross an arena without being caught by a giant robot doll.
When the remaining players arrived in the dorm, they were given their own small, personal bag of toiletries, plus communal toiletries were also available in the bathrooms. However, lip balm was not provided, and soon the participants were desperate to moisten their lips.
Some players then turned to unwrapping the condoms provided on set to lubricate their dry lips.
Plutnicki, 25, who participated in the challenge with his mother, LeAnn Wilcox Plutnicki, attempted to solve his chapped lips with other items.
“There was lotion, there was conditioner, and those were the first two tries,” he said. “And after I tried those and they weren’t working, I was like, ‘Well, that’s all of our options, because obviously we’re not going to use the condoms.’ And within a day, maybe a day and a half, all the condoms were gone. It was absurd. And it still didn’t work!”
Eventually, players were given their own tins of lip balm, which Plutnicki used before being eliminated in the tenth game, titled Glass Bridge, while his mother, 65, was sent home after being eliminated in the ninth game, Marbles. Before leaving, contestants faked their own deaths.
Now only three people remain in Squid Game: The Challenge. Mai, player 287, is a 55-year-old immigration judge from Virginia. According to Netflix, if she wins, she will buy a home for her retirement. Phill, number 451, is a 27-year-old scuba instructor and musician from Hawaii. If he wins, he plans to donate a large sum of his prize to ocean conservation. Sam, contestant 016, is a 37-year-old artist from Florida who did not reveal his plans if he becomes the champion.
They will compete for $4.6 million, the largest cash prize in reality TV history, according to Esquire, in Squid Game: The Challenge’s season-ending tenth episode premiering Wednesday, December 6, on Netflix.