Engin Akyürek, the actor of Turkey’s great romantic dramas who titled his first book Silence

Engin Akyürek

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	October 12, 1981 Ankara, Turkey
Occupation	Actor and writer
Known for	Destiny, A Small September Affair
Awards	Seoul International Drama Awards – Best Actor · International Emmy Award – Best Actor Nomination · Film Critics Association – Most Promising Actor · Peru Latina Turkish Awards – Best Actor

Within a single autumn, Engin Akyürek appeared on two very different screens. On Netflix, Old Money, a romance about a self-made tycoon and the heiress whose family mansion he wants, climbed into Netflix’s daily rankings in dozens of countries and was renewed for a second season. On Turkish network television, Bereketli Topraklar, a feud drama in which he played the head of a landowning family, was gone after five episodes. Between the two sits a quieter project that his television audience rarely discusses: three books of short stories, called Sessizlik, Zamansız and İsimsiz. Silence, Timeless, Nameless. For an actor whose fame rests on some of the most emotionally loud series Turkey has exported, it is an odd choice of titles, and a revealing one.

Nothing in his early life pointed toward a set. He grew up in Ankara in a family from Tercan, a town in the eastern province of Erzincan; his father worked as a civil servant, his mother ran the household, and he has a younger brother. He studied history in the Faculty of Language, History and Geography at Ankara University, with no drama school, conservatory or theatre company behind him. A couple of years after graduating he entered Türkiye’nin Yıldızları, a televised talent contest for aspiring actors, and won it. Another contestant that season was Beren Saat, who would matter to his career a few years later.

Born on 12 October 1981, he finished his degree in 2002 and won the contest in 2004. The prize was a supporting part in Yabancı Damat, a Kanal D comedy-drama about a Turkish family whose daughter marries into a Greek one. Akyürek played Kadir Sadıkoğlu in all 106 episodes between 2004 and 2007, alongside veterans such as Erdal Özyağcılar and Zeki Alasya, and the series found an audience in Greece as well as at home. In 2006 the director Zeki Demirkubuz, one of the most uncompromising realists in Turkish cinema, cast him as Cevat in Kader, a bleak story of obsessive love. The role earned him promising-actor prizes from the Turkish Film Critics Association (SİYAD) and from the actors’ association ÇASOD. He followed it with Nizipli Halim in Karayılan, a period series set in Gaziantep during the French occupation, and a lead part in the stage musical Romantika in 2007.

His first television lead, in 2009, set the template. In Bir Bulut Olsam, written by Meral Okay for Kanal D, he played Mustafa Bulut, an epileptic young man so fixated on his teenage cousin and wife, Narin, that he shoots her on the day his family forces him into a second marriage. It was a disturbing character, played without winks to the audience, and it made producers see that Akyürek could carry a story built on a damaged man.

The series that carried his name abroad came next. Fatmagül’ün Suçu Ne?, produced by Ay Yapım and broadcast on Kanal D from 2010 to 2012, adapted a story by Vedat Türkali that had already been filmed in 1986. It follows a young woman from a village near Çeşme who is raped by the sons of a wealthy family and then pushed into marriage with Kerim Ilgaz, one of the men present that night. Akyürek played Kerim across 80 episodes, opposite his former contest rival Beren Saat. The drama asked viewers to follow a man who begins on the wrong side of a crime and slowly earns, or fails to earn, the right to be loved. It travelled widely beyond Turkey, and in 2017 the Peru Latina Turkish Awards, a Peruvian prize for Turkish series, named him best actor.

In 2014 he took the lead in the film Bi Küçük Eylül Meselesi, written and directed by Kerem Deren and shot on the island of Bozcaada with Farah Zeynep Abdullah. The same year he returned to television in Kara Para Aşk, an ATV crime romance produced by Ay Yapım. He played Ömer Demir, a police detective whose fiancée is found shot dead in a car next to a wealthy businessman, the father of the jeweller played by Tuba Büyüküstün. The series ran for 54 episodes until July 2015. That year Akyürek won best actor at the Seoul International Drama Awards and was nominated for best actor at the International Emmy Awards, where the prize went to someone else. At home he also collected the Marconi Award of Uludağ University and the Kristal Fare (Crystal Mouse) award for best actor.

He then spaced out his work. Ölene Kadar, a 2017 drama produced by TIMS, cast him as Dağhan Soysür. On the big screen he starred in Çağan Irmak’s Çocuklar Sana Emanet in 2018 and in Bir Aşk İki Hayat, adapted from a Greek film, in 2019. From December 2019 to May 2021 he led Sefirin Kızı on Star TV as Sancar Efeoğlu, a sharecropper’s son from Bodrum whose love, an ambassador’s daughter named Nare, disappears on the night they finally come together and returns nine years later, on the night of his wedding to another woman, with his daughter. The series was shot in Muğla and Montenegro and ran to 52 episodes. When Neslihan Atagül left the show in January 2021 for health reasons, Tuba Büyüküstün came in, reuniting the pair from Kara Para Aşk. The role brought him the best actor prize at the third International İzmir Film Festival in 2020.

His writing life began in October 2018, when Doğan Kitap published Sessizlik, a collection of short stories. Zamansız followed in 2023 and later reached Spanish readers as Atemporal. In 2022 he also wrote the story for Kaçış, the first Turkish original series on Disney+, directed by Yağız Alp Akaydın from a screenplay by Ali Doğançay. He played Mehmet Yücel opposite İrem Helvacıoğlu across eight episodes, and critics praised both his performance and his story. The same year he starred with Tolga Sarıtaş in the Netflix film Yolun Açık Olsun, as a military captain named Salih. He has worked as a brand ambassador for Disney+ Türkiye and for Shell.

There is a fair criticism to be made of the roles that made him popular. Mustafa shoots the woman he claims to love. Kerim is present at a rape and is later offered to viewers as the romantic lead. In Adım Farah, the 2023 FOX adaptation of the Argentine series La chica que limpia, he played Tahir Lekesiz, a mafia enforcer who must decide what to do with an Iranian cleaning woman, played by Demet Özdemir, who has witnessed a murder. Turkish drama has long turned men who threaten, coerce or kill into objects of longing, and Akyürek has been one of its most persuasive instruments. His defence, implicit in how he plays them, is restraint: he rarely asks for sympathy and lets the guilt show. The approach does not always survive weak material. Reviewing the early end of Bereketli Topraklar, the columnist Aslı Sertdemir wrote in December 2025 that he usually carries heavy stories, but that this production was built so badly that even his light went out.

That series, made by Süreç Film and directed by Yağız Alp Akaydın, premiered on Show TV on 2 November 2025. Set among rival landowning families in Adana, it cast him as Ömer Bereketoğlu opposite Gülsim Ali and Belçim Bilgin, and its last episode aired on 30 November. Old Money, known in Turkey as Enfes Bir Akşam, had a different fate. Written by Meriç Acemi, directed by Uluç Bayraktar and produced by TIMS & B Productions, it arrived worldwide on Netflix on 10 October 2025, with Akyürek as Osman Bulut, a man who built a fortune from nothing, and Aslı Enver as Nihal Baydemir, heir to an old seafaring family. It spent three weeks in Netflix’s global top 10 for non-English series and more than a month in Turkey’s daily chart, and its renewal was reported in November 2025.

In April 2026 he published his third collection, İsimsiz, 22 short stories built around human relationships, inner journeys and emotional breaking points. At the launch, Binnur Kaya, his co-star from Yabancı Damat two decades earlier, came to support him. He seldom talks about his private life, and the Turkish press tends to describe him as enigmatic. Filming on the second season of Old Money began in August 2026: eight episodes, again written by Acemi and directed by Bayraktar, with Gürbey İleri joining the cast. Netflix has not announced a premiere date, so the next chapter of Osman’s story, and the next test of whether Akyürek can keep turning compromised men into the centre of a love story, is still being shot.