Warning: This article contains spoilers for the finale of Squid Game: The Challenge
After ten episodes of suspense, tears, backstabbing, really bad green tracksuits and children’s games with multimillion-dollar consequences, 456 contestants have been whittled down to one. The winner of Squid Game: The Challenge is player No 287, aka Mai Whelan, a 55-year-old immigration adjudicator from Virginia who left Vietnam during the Fall of Saigon at the age of eight. After beating Phill Cain, 27, a scuba instructor from Hawaii, in a protracted and rather anticlimactic game of rock, paper, scissors, Whelan takes home $4.56 million (£3.55 million), the second biggest prize in reality TV history after the American edition of The X Factor ($5 million).
Well, she will take it home at some point. Despite winning the show in February, Whelan hasn’t received a cent yet, she says over a video call from New York. “I feel like Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire. Show me the money!” When Netflix does pay up she plans on giving some of the money to charities for the underprivileged, wildlife and climate change. All she has bought herself so far is a swanky short haircut — her buddies from the show didn’t recognise her — plus a black velvet Ralph Lauren dress and Jimmy Choo shoes for the Squid Game gala she has just attended. “I still have buyer’s remorse from that, but I think it’s well deserved.”
She must have other plans. “I’m thinking about a retirement home somewhere,” she says. “We don’t know where yet, and we are happy with where we are.” She and her husband live in Fairfax County, Virginia, and she has two daughters, 36 and 34, and a nine-year-old granddaughter. “We live on the water. It’s very peaceful.” It sounds like some of the other contestants could have done with the money more than Whelan — her husband works in mergers and acquisitions. Even if she wanted to give some of her winnings to other players, though, she says she wouldn’t be able to — they signed contracts forbidding that.
Based on Squid Game, the global hit drama from South Korea, Squid Game: The Challenge was filmed over two weeks in a studio in Bedfordshire with 316 contestants from America, 99 from the UK and the rest from 19 countries including Brazil, South Africa and the Philippines. The show has been viewed for more than 170 million hours worldwide since its launch on November 22 and has already been renewed for a second season.
“I didn’t expect it to be so stressful,” Whelan says. “It takes a lot out of you, that game. To beat out 455 players was a very emotional moment for me.”
“Mai is full of fire, she’s fierce, she’s competent, she’s strong, she’s smart, she’s easy to underestimate,” said Cain (aka no 451) in the lead up to the last game. So it proved, as she walloped him repeatedly at rock, paper, scissors. While Cain treated it as a game of chance Whelan drew up a strategy, theorising that a man “would tend to be drawn towards rock and scissors because they symbolise power”.
Did she win because she was smarter? “I don’t think I’m smarter,” she says. “I’m older than him and I’ve experienced things. It’s just knowledge.” Did she feel sorry for Cain? “I did not because I felt we were equals. We played a fair game. He felt that I deserved to win because I beat him a lot at rock, paper, scissors!”
When I ask who she will stay in contact with, she names cuddly Chad Van Horn, with whom she had the strongest bond and whom she punched in anger when he was eliminated. She also mentions Ashley Tolbert, which is a big surprise because the bust-up between her and Whelan was a dramatic high point of the show.
It came after the round in which the players had to cross a glass bridge where half the panes supported their weight and the other half shattered. A majority agreed to a plan in which everyone took one 50/50 leap but Tolbert, aka player no 278, refused, letting poor, sweet Trey Plutnicki in front of her take several jumps and ultimately plunge to elimination.
Whelan branded Tolbert untrustworthy and put her forward to be eliminated in a later round. “It was hard for me to see,” she says. “Trey’s a good guy, and for him to take that many leaps.” All is sunny now, she says, not entirely convincingly. “It’s just a game — you can’t hold grudges. Ashley and I made up and we explained our differences.”
It must be said that Whelan indulged in her share of skulduggery, using a ruthlessness and ability to read people she had learnt assessing claimants for immigration into the US. In the ironically named Circle of Trust round she nominated Roland Hannigan, whose hair she had just been braiding, for elimination. Cold, but necessary. Had the others guessed Whelan had picked him she would have gone instead. “I had to go with Roland because he and I were close,” she says. “If I picked anybody else it would be just a target on my back.”
The finale scored highly on diversity, with a gay man, Sam Wells (016), joining two immigrants, Whelan and the Brazilian-born Cain. Whelan, though, had the best story of the lot. She left Vietnam with her mother and siblings in 1975. “I don’t have much memory of it except for, you know, the gun to my head,” she says, with impressive nonchalance. When the family were being evacuated, “for safety reasons the American soldiers asked everybody who was on the airfield to lay flat on the ground and if you even put your head up they thought that was a threat.” An eight-year-old Whelan moved to see what was going on and found a barrel against her head. Her mother pulled her back down just in time. “I’m glad he did not shoot me.”
Her father fared even worse. “The Viet Cong found him and buried him up to his neck in the jungle.” He survived but didn’t make it to the US until the 2000s. The rest of the family settled in Pennsylvania and after school Whelan joined the US navy in search of adventure. While serving she fell pregnant at 19. “I was a virgin; I didn’t know anything,” she said through tears in the show. “My family cut me off, it was very hard. I didn’t know anything about motherhood. I didn’t have anyone.”
Once you’ve gone through all that, a reality show won’t hold many fears. Some of Whelan’s fellow contestants were made of less stern stuff. According to The Hollywood Reporter, a British solicitors firm has sent letters to Netflix claiming players had “suffered injuries such as hypothermia and nerve damage as a result of poor health and safety standards on set”. No lawsuit has been brought as yet.
Many of the complaints centred on the opening Red Light Green Light game, a giant version of Grandmother’s Footsteps that took several hours to film in chilly conditions. Yet Whelan says it was her favourite part of the whole show. “It was physical and I love physical activity — I once ran 62 miles,” she says. What a trooper, and a worthy winner.
