Ayça Ayşin Turan, the actress who keeps choosing to start from zero

Ayça Ayşin Turan

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	October 25, 1992 Sinop, Turkey
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Make Me Believe, Love in 39 Degrees
Awards	Golden Butterfly · Palme d'Or · Ayaklı Gazete TV Stars · Istanbul University 1453 · ゴールデン・バタフライ賞 2021年ロマンティック・コメディ部門主演女優賞 · ゴールデン・パーム賞 2023年映画部門女優賞 · アヤクル・ガゼテTVスターズ賞 2020年デジタルTVシリーズ部門女優賞

The weekend Netflix released its first series made in Turkey, one of its leads was talking to a newspaper about her final exams. Ayça Ayşin Turan had frozen her degree in Radio, Television and Cinema at Istanbul University once acting took over her calendar, and she had gone back to finish it while playing Leyla Sancak in The Protector. She told Hürriyet she did not want anything to come between her and her diploma, and that fame was not her goal in life. It was easy to file that under modesty. Read against the career she has built since, it sounds more like a working method.

She gave the method a name in the same conversation: be flexible enough to start from zero. Turan has done exactly that on almost every kind of screen Turkey now has, from a daily soap and network prime time to a Netflix fantasy series, a Netflix romantic comedy, a Prime Video feature, the beIN streamer TOD, the state broadcaster’s platform tabii and the multiplex. What has changed far less is the part the industry likes to hand her: the composed, self-made woman who discovers, a few episodes in, that composure has cost her something. Her current Show TV series is built around precisely that woman, and the man across the table is Ekin Koç, for the third time.

A Black Sea childhood and an early start

Turan was born in Sinop, on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, on 25 October 1992, the youngest of seven children. Her father, a teacher, comes from neighbouring Kastamonu; her mother, a homemaker, is from Sinop. She has five older brothers and one older sister, and asked once what being from the Black Sea means, she reached for the sea itself: like its waves, sometimes calm, sometimes rough. Her mother’s side of the family descends from migrants who left Selanik, today’s Thessaloniki, and she has used that history to dismiss online claims that her father was Tunisian. Both sides, she told Sözcü, are from the Black Sea.

By her own account she was the model student with braided hair and good marks, third in her high-school class and fourth in her intake when she entered university, and the plan was always the cinema and television department in Istanbul. The city frightened her at first. She started working at eighteen. Her first screen job was Gülfem in Dinle Sevgili, a daily drama on FOX that ran from 2011 into 2012. Karagül, on the same channel, followed in 2013: as Ada Şamverdi she stayed with the family saga until 2016, through more than 120 episodes, and in 2015 she took a lead film role in the comedy Sevimli Tehlikeli.

From Kanal D to the first Turkish Netflix original

Her first lead came in 2016 with Altınsoylar on Kanal D, which lasted four episodes. The second, on the same channel a year later, held. In Meryem she played the title character, Meryem Akça, across 30 episodes in 2017 and 2018. In 2017 she was also chosen to co-host the 44th Altın Kelebek (Golden Butterfly) Awards with Cem Davran, a year before most viewers outside Turkey had heard her name.

The Protector, released by Netflix in December 2018 and known at home as Hakan: Muhafız, was the first Netflix original shot in Turkey: a fantasy series about a Grand Bazaar shopkeeper, played by Çağatay Ulusoy, who inherits the duty of defending Istanbul. Turan played Leyla Sancak, assistant to Okan Yalabık’s businessman Faysal Erdem and Hakan’s first love interest, across the first two seasons and 18 episodes. She said she had one week to prepare after the offer arrived, and described Leyla as a woman in love with her work who had clawed her way to where she stood. The launch publicity leaned on an intimate scene with Ulusoy; her answer to the press was procedural. The limits of what gets filmed, she said, are set out clearly and in advance, and the conversation worth having was about a Turkish production opening the door for others. Recognition followed at home. In 2019 her own university gave her its 1453 Award as actress of the year, and in 2020 the Ayaklı Gazete TV Stars Awards named her best actress in a digital series.

Prime time, a prize and a template

Back on network television she moved fast. Zemheri on Show TV in 2020 cast her as Firuze Pınar. The same channel’s Arıza, from that September, paired her with Tolga Sarıtaş as Halide Gürkan, a mob boss’s daughter who climbs into the taxi of a driver named Ali Rıza, and the role brought her a best actress nomination at the Altın Kelebek. The award itself came for the next series. In Star TV’s Ada Masalı, in 2021, she played Haziran Sedefli, a city businesswoman stranded on an island who clashes with, and then falls for, the local Poyraz, played by Alp Navruz. At the 47th Altın Kelebek ceremony in December 2021 she won best actress in a romantic comedy, and she and Navruz were nominated as best couple.

That prize is also where the critical problem with her career begins. Since Ada Masalı, the offers that have travelled furthest share one premise: an accomplished, guarded woman and a man who wrecks her plans. In Make Me Believe, the Netflix romantic comedy released in June 2023 as Sen İnandır, she is Sahra, a magazine editor whose grandmother fakes a heart problem to throw her back together with a childhood rival, the photographer played by Ekin Koç. In Sevmek Yüzünden, a cinema release from March 2024, she is İdil, a wedding-dress designer whose ex-boyfriend is about to marry a client. In Love in 39 Degrees, made for Prime Video as 39 Derecede Aşk and released in December 2024, she is Kumru, a lawyer racing around Izmir for eight hours to gather evidence with Furkan Andıç. The template sells, above all to international streaming audiences, and she plays it with real comic timing. It also narrows what producers ask of an actress who carried heavier material in Meryem and Arıza. She has said herself that looks alone wear thin: nobody, in her words, wants to watch someone beautiful but boring.

The one network project that broke the pattern on paper did not last. Kader Bağları, a FOX drama that opened in September 2023 with her as Sevda Güneş opposite Serkan Çayoğlu, ended after five episodes. Her next four projects came from outside the weekly ratings race: two cinema releases, a Prime Video film and a series for TOD.

Vicdansız, Bugün Güzel and the return to prime time

The darkest of them is the most interesting. Vicdansız, a TOD original written by Levent Cantek and directed by Devrim Yalçın, premiered on 18 December 2025 and ran for ten episodes into January 2026. Ekin Koç plays Deniz, an investment adviser torn between his boss’s daughter and Vicdan, the woman he loves; after a car crash Vicdan vanishes and nobody remembers that she ever existed. Turan plays Vicdan, a part whose whole function is to be doubted, by the other characters and by a viewer asked to decide whether she was ever real. Her character’s name means conscience in Turkish. The title means having none.

A week earlier, on 12 December 2025, Bugün Güzel opened in Turkish cinemas. Directed by Mali Ergin from a story by Oğuzhan Koç, who also stars as Ali, a television presenter known for healthy-living advice who is diagnosed with a brain tumour, the film gives Turan the role of Güneş, the nurse who becomes his strongest support.

Then came the return to prime time. Muhtemel Aşk, directed by Altan Dönmez from scripts by Elif Gamze Arslan and Derya Kara, launched on Show TV on 18 June 2026 as a summer series and has stayed in the autumn schedule, with its 20th episode broadcast on 22 October. She plays Defne Derin, a woman in her thirties who built her career on her own, as her mother taught her, and who one day notices how tired and isolated she has become, just as two men, Kadir and Tolga, arrive to turn everything over. Ekin Koç and Feyyaz Şerifoğlu share the leads with her, which makes this the third story she and Koç carry together. When ratings dipped over the summer and talk of an early finale spread, cast member Hayal Köseoğlu publicly denied it, and Show TV has announced no end date.

Two other projects are waiting. For Rüzgarlı Pazar, an eight-episode adaptation of Mustafa Kutlu’s book for tabii, directed by Berat Özdoğan and set in the 2000s, she plays Nimet, a young woman who cannot see; to prepare, she taped over her eye at home and spent a month learning Braille. The series went before the cameras in 2025 with İsmail Hacıoğlu as Ateş, but its trailers were later pulled from social media and tabii has announced no premiere date. The feature Al Beni Baba, directed by Ahmet Topuz with Erkan Petekkaya, lists her as Nazlı.

Her line about fame, that the job ends when the costume comes off and the make-up is wiped away, was given at 26, in the middle of exam season. Eight years and more than a dozen productions later, the other line has aged better. Being flexible enough to start from zero has kept her working on every kind of Turkish screen. The test now is whether a producer will give her a woman who is not, at the start of the story, already in control.