Our Sticky Love Cast: Who Plays Who, Plus the Title's Pun

A prosecutor wakes up in a country clinic ringed by taffy workshops, unable to remember her own name, and a boxing coach she doesn’t recognize insists he’s her boyfriend. That lie drives Our Sticky Love, the Netflix rom-com that climbed from No. 5 to No. 1 on the streamer’s global non-English TV chart across its first two chart weeks in August 2026. Below, the Our Sticky Love cast is ordered by how much each character moves the plot, with what each actor is known for. Every role description comes from Netflix’s own press material or Korean entertainment reporting, not fan wikis.

Quick answers

• Jung Hae-in plays Jang Tae-ha, a former youth boxing champion turned gangster turned small-town boxing coach, and Ha Young plays Go Eun-sae, an elite prosecutor who loses her memory while chasing a crime syndicate.
• All 12 episodes arrived on Netflix on August 7, 2026, and the series ranked No. 1 on Netflix’s global non-English TV list for August 10–16, 2026, with 7.5 million views.
• The Korean title, 이런 엿같은 사랑, reads both as “this yeot-like love” (yeot is Korea’s traditional sticky taffy) and as the slang “this crappy love.”

Here’s the core cast at a glance, with the Hangul names you’ll see in Korean coverage:

Actor	Character	Role in the story
Jung Hae-in (정해인)	Jang Tae-ha (장태하)	Former youth boxing champion and ex-gangster, now a small-town boxing coach who claims to be Eun-sae’s boyfriend
Ha Young (하영)	Go Eun-sae (고은새)	Anti-corruption prosecutor who loses her memory while chasing a crime syndicate
Heo Sung-tae (허성태)	Baek Sang-gil (백상길)	Crime boss with a respectable businessman’s front; Tae-ha’s antagonist
Lee Jae-won (이재원)	Ahn Gi-jun (안기준)	Clinic director treating Eun-sae, and Tae-ha’s old classmate
Jang Hye-jin (장혜진), Cha Chung-hwa (차청화), Kim Mi-hwa (김미화)	Hui-ja (희자), Maeng-suk (맹숙), Geum-hyang (금향)	Yeot Village’s meddling trio
Kim Young-ok (김영옥)	Yeon-hong (연홍)	Her storyline with Tae-ha is the series’ tearjerker
Jung Soon-won (정순원)	Gang-rok (강록)	Comic relief

1. Jung Hae-in as Jang Tae-ha, the ex-boxer with a protective lie

Jung Hae-in plays Jang Tae-ha, a former youth boxing champion who fell into gang life and now coaches at a small-town gym, according to Netflix’s production announcement. On his final job for the gang he crosses paths with Eun-sae, his long-lost first love, who no longer remembers him. To protect her, he tells her he’s her boyfriend. The joke is that Tae-ha has zero practice at this. “Since he’s never dated anyone, he can be pretty awkward and clumsy, but that only makes him more charming,” Jung said at the Seoul press conference, as reported by the Korea Times.

Jung’s résumé runs in two lanes. The Korea Herald introduced him as the “D.P.” star, a nod to An Joon-ho, the deserter-pursuit soldier he played in Netflix’s military drama D.P. Romance viewers know the other lane: Something in the Rain, One Spring Night and Love Next Door, where he played celebrated young architect Choi Seung-hyo. Tae-ha borrows from both, a fighter with a soft center, and in Jung’s words viewers “get to see comedy, action, and romance all in one character.”

2. Ha Young as Go Eun-sae, the prosecutor with amnesia

Ha Young plays Go Eun-sae, a prosecutor in the anti-corruption investigation department of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office, per Netflix Korea’s casting announcement. An accident during her pursuit of a crime syndicate wipes her memory, and she comes to in a rural clinic surrounded by taffy shops, with Tae-ha claiming to be her boyfriend. Her memory is gone; her standards aren’t. In Netflix’s premiere release, her “high-end city instincts remain intact,” which leads to “hilarious bickering as she refuses to believe this rugged country boxer could ever be her type.”

Sports Seoul’s review points out how far Eun-sae sits from the fragile heroine who waits to be rescued: she’s confident, sometimes blunt to a fault, a little arrogant. Ha Young’s own summary of the pairing at the press conference was “an anxious girlfriend meeting a grounded boyfriend who keeps her centered.” Korean entertainment press called this her first rom-com lead. Before it, viewers saw her as nurse Cheon Jang-mi in season 1 of The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call, and she also appeared in Doona!

You’ll see her name two ways in English headlines. Ha Young is the name she works under, and her legal name is Ahn Ha-young, the form used in some Korea Herald stories, while Netflix and the Korea Times print Ha Young (하영). That same Korea Times report carries Netflix’s Sept. 1, 2026 statement that she will not appear in the next season of The Trauma Code, a decision that followed allegations about her great-grandfather’s pro-Japanese activities during the colonial era and her apology in August.

3. Heo Sung-tae as Baek Sang-gil, the crime boss behind the noir half

Heo Sung-tae plays Baek Sang-gil, a legendary crime boss who presents as a dignified businessman but turns ruthless the moment he’s betrayed, and he’s the one squaring off against Tae-ha, according to the casting report in Sports Kyunghyang. Netflix’s premiere release keeps him “looming in the background” of all the bickering. That’s where the show’s second genre lives. “On set, we used to joke that scenes with Go Eun-sae (Ha Young) felt like a pure romance, but the second she wrapped for the day, it turned into a gritty noir,” Jung told reporters, per the Korea Times.

Squid Game viewers already know Heo as Jang Deok-su, Player No. 101, the gangster the Korea Herald described as terrorizing fellow contestants “with sociopathic calculation.” His storyline has at least one skeptic. Sports Seoul’s reviewer wrote that from the midpoint on, similar conflicts repeat and, as the fight around Baek Sang-gil keeps going, the story stretches out 엿가락처럼, “like a strand of yeot,” a taffy pun of the critic’s own.

4. Lee Jae-won as Ahn Gi-jun, the doctor caught in the middle

Lee Jae-won plays Ahn Gi-jun, the clinic director who treats Eun-sae and happens to be Tae-ha’s old classmate, per the same Sports Seoul review. That puts him in an awkward spot: he’s handling her amnesia as a doctor while sharing a school history with the man who claims to be her boyfriend. The review credits him with grounded, everyday comedy, the kind of supporting part that keeps a 12-episode run from sagging between plot beats.

5. Jang Hye-jin, Cha Chung-hwa and Kim Mi-hwa as the Yeot Village trio

Jang Hye-jin plays Hui-ja, Cha Chung-hwa plays Maeng-suk and Kim Mi-hwa plays Geum-hyang, the three villagers Sports Seoul’s review nicknames Yeot Village’s S.E.S., after the three-member girl group. Each barges into Eun-sae and Tae-ha’s lives in her own way, sometimes for a laugh and sometimes to push the couple a step closer, and the review says the show perks up every time they appear. For a heroine with no memory, nosy neighbors make a natural comedy engine.

6. The rest of the Our Sticky Love cast: Kim Young-ok, Jung Soon-won and the flashbacks

Kim Young-ok plays Yeon-hong, and her storyline with Tae-ha is what Sports Seoul calls the show’s “tear button.” Jung Soon-won’s Gang-rok is the opposite: the review’s pick for a sure laugh whenever the mood needs lifting. The leads’ first meeting as children plays out in flashbacks, with Choi Myung-bin (최명빈) as young Eun-sae and Ha Min-hyuk (하민혁) as young Tae-ha. One caution from the same review is that the flashbacks run heavy, and the childhood first-meeting scene repeats more than once.

7. Yeot Village, and the pun hiding in the Korean title

The Korean title, 이런 엿같은 사랑 (ireon yeot-gateun sarang), works on two levels: literally “this yeot-like love,” and in everyday slang, “this crappy love.” Start with the candy. The Standard Korean Language Dictionary defines 엿 as a sweet, sticky food made by cooking grain, breaking it down with malt, straining it and boiling it until it turns thick and gooey. Now the insult: 우리말샘, the National Institute of Korean Language’s open dictionary, lists 엿같다 as a vulgar adjective for feeling rotten because a person or situation is so unsatisfactory, and the Korea Herald equates the slang with the expletive English version of “messed up.”

Netflix leans into both readings. Its English copy calls Yeot Village “a quaint countryside town in Gujin-gun,” and Netflix Korea’s 2025 casting announcement wakes Eun-sae up in a country clinic lined with taffy workshops, then describes her refusing to accept her “‘엿’ 같은 인생” (a “yeot-like life”) before she ends up clinging to Tae-ha “달콤하고 찐득하게” (sweetly and stickily). With 엿 set off in quote marks, that phrase reads as both a taffy life and a lousy one. Even the spelling shifted. The 2025 announcement wrote the title with a space, 이런 엿 같은 사랑, while the July 2026 premiere announcement closes it up as 엿같은, exactly how the dictionary spells the slang adjective.

Director Kim Jang-han has addressed the title directly. “The expression ‘yeot-like’ can make a strong impression, but yeot is a sweet and sticky traditional Korean confection. I thought it was the perfect metaphor for the love and connection between the two characters,” he said, as quoted by the Korea Herald. In the Korea Times’ press-conference report he went further: yeot “represents fate, and just like yeot tastes different depending on how it’s made, the title carries several layers of meaning.”

There’s a third, luckier layer. The verb 붙다 (butda), “to stick,” also means to pass an exam, per 우리말샘, which is why sales of sticky foods surge every November around the Suneung, Korea’s college entrance exam, according to the Korea Herald. So the English title, Our Sticky Love, keeps the sweet half of the joke and quietly drops the rude one. If slang like this is your way into Korean, the Korean dating slang guide runs the same dictionary check on words like sseom and mildang.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many episodes does Our Sticky Love have?

Twelve, and they all dropped at once: the Korea Herald reported that all 12 episodes would be released globally on August 7, 2026. It’s a Netflix exclusive, so there’s no weekly TV broadcast to wait for.

Q: Did Our Sticky Love reach No. 1 on Netflix?

Yes. It opened at No. 5 on Netflix’s global non-English TV list in its first, three-day chart week, Korean press reported, then rose to No. 1 for August 10–16, 2026, with 7.5 million views. That week it ranked first in 26 countries, including South Korea, Brazil, Indonesia and Singapore, and made the Top 10 in 68, per the Netflix figures carried by the Korea Times. Agent Kim Reactivated sat ninth on the same list with 1.4 million views, and its cast guide is a good next read if you liked this one’s crime side.

Q: Who directed Our Sticky Love?

Kim Jang-han, the director of Do You Like Brahms? and My Demon, working from a script by Mo Ji-hye, who wrote You Raise Me Up. Netflix’s announcement describes the series as the pair’s reunion after four years.

Q: Is Our Sticky Love more rom-com or thriller?

Both, in sequence. Jung Hae-in’s own description: “It starts as a rom-com, turns into a melodrama, dips into thriller and noir territory, and then weaves back to romance.” Expect the lightest material up front and the Baek Sang-gil storyline to carry more weight from the midpoint on.

Q: What was Our Sticky Love’s English title before?

Lovestuck. That was the working title when Netflix announced the series in 2025, and by the July 2026 premiere announcement it had become Our Sticky Love.

Q: What does “go eat yeot” mean in Korean?

It’s a rude brush-off. Telling someone to go eat yeot (엿 먹어라, yeot meogeora) is dismissive or offensive, and saying you “ate yeot” is close to “I’m screwed,” the Korea Herald explains. How a candy handed to exam-takers picked up those meanings is unsettled: the National Institute of Korean Language has confirmed there is no official explanation, the paper reports.

Start where this list starts. The story opens with Eun-sae waking up with no memory and Tae-ha stepping in as her “boyfriend,” so watch Jung Hae-in’s first scenes knowing the claim is a lie told to protect her, and keep the title’s rude second meaning in your ear. For another Netflix series that makes more sense once you know the Korean underneath, Mousetrap’s folktale roots are the next stop.