Aslıhan Malbora, the engineer-turned-actress who made Netflix take Turkish drama seriously

Aslıhan Malbora

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	March 27, 1995 Afyonkarahisar, Turkey
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Last Summer

The decision that shapes Aslıhan Malbora’s story is not the one she made when cameras first found her. It is the earlier one — the one most people do not make: walking away from an engineering degree at Istanbul Technical University, one of Turkey’s most selective institutions, to study at a small acting house and risk everything on a profession that routinely ejects those who deserve to stay.

She grew up in Afyonkarahisar, a city in central Anatolia that most Istanbul residents couldn’t reliably place on a map. She arrived in the city carrying both a place in the Food and Chemical Engineering program at Istanbul Technical University and a stubborn private suspicion that she was in the wrong classroom. She enrolled at Akademi 35.5 Sanat Evi while still a registered engineering student, training in acting alongside coursework she had already decided to leave.

Her television debut came in 2017 with a small role in the drama series Seven Ne Yapmaz. What followed over the next two years — guest appearances, a supporting turn in the historical series Kalbimin Sultanı, and the slower discipline of showing up and doing the work — looked from the outside like a waiting period. It was, in fact, research.

Her Yerde Sen, the romantic comedy series she led on FOX Turkey in 2019, changed the calculation. Across 23 episodes, Malbora played Ayda Akman with a precision that the genre rarely demands: a woman defined not by what she wants but by what she refuses. The series became a genuine hit, and the conversation around her shifted from promising to established.

By the time Üç Kuruş arrived in 2021-2022, she had accumulated something rarer than talent in Turkish television: a track record. The action drama on Show TV gave her Leyla, a character whose intelligence and calculated moves the show treated seriously across 28 episodes on a major national network. It confirmed that the earlier success was not luck but pattern.

The Netflix film Geçen Yaz (Last Summer), released in 2021 and streamed globally, widened the frame. Working with director Ozan Açıktan, she appeared in a coming-of-age story set along the Turkish coastline that reached viewers who had never encountered a Turkish network series. The film introduced the specific quality of her screen presence to an international audience.

The role she is perhaps most interesting in is also the one easiest to overlook. In the Netflix thriller Kübra (2024), Malbora appeared in a supporting capacity alongside a lead with substantially greater screen time and industry attention. Critics who watched carefully found it: in scenes not built around her, she consistently located the specific detail — the fractional pause, the unfinished gesture — that made her character’s interiority visible. Turkish television does not always recognize actresses who arrive slightly ahead of the culture’s readiness to fully see them.

Yaban Çiçekleri, the ATV series in which she starred opposite Akın Akınözü beginning in 2024, returned her to lead territory where her range is most legible. She played Ela Ataman, a lawyer whose emotional intelligence the show used as its central dramatic engine, set across the landscapes of Istanbul and Ayvalık.

Her most recent completed work is Lefter: Bir Ordinaryüs Hikayesi (Lefter: The Story of the Ordinarius), the Netflix biographical film about legendary Turkish-Greek footballer Lefter Küçükandonyadis, which premiered in November 2025 and extended her international streaming presence further.

Malbora keeps her private life precisely that — a choice that in Turkey’s media landscape requires active maintenance rather than passive omission. The decision is, characteristically, deliberate.

The engineer’s instinct — the one that decided, years ago, that the variables in a given system needed recalculation — is the same one that has driven every role she has accepted since. The next project has not been publicly announced. That is probably not a coincidence.