Beren Saat, the Aşk-ı Memnu star who walked away from Turkish prime time

Beren Saat

Photo: Onur / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 26, 1984 Ankara, Turkey
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Last Call for Istanbul, My World, Rhino Season
Awards	2 Golden Butterfly · Golden Tulip Fine Arts · Premio APES · Murex d'Or · Golden Artemis

By the most quoted count, three of every four people in Turkey watched the night Bihter Yöreoğlu Ziyagil turned a gun on herself in the last episode of Aşk-ı Memnu. The actress who played her, Beren Saat, has spent the years since declining to stay that woman. She walked away from network television, made her best-known recent work for Netflix, saw a finished film vanish from cinema schedules days before it opened, and now sings in English under her first name alone.

The easy reading is restlessness. The better one is a long negotiation with the particular fame Turkish drama manufactures, the kind that turns a fictional death into an anniversary: a year after that finale aired, viewers were still posting messages mourning Bihter on the date she died.

Saat grew up in Ankara, where she was born in February 1984 to Ayla and Hüseyin Avni Saat, both graduates of the sports academy. At TED Ankara College she sang in school musicals; at Başkent University she started a business degree she did not want. Friends pushed her into Türkiye’nin Yıldızları, a televised acting contest, where she finished second. A run of sweets commercials for the director Sinan Çetin followed, and then the producer and director Tomris Giritlioğlu took her on.

Giritlioğlu shaped the first stretch of the career. After a small part as Nermin in Aşkımızda Ölüm Var, Saat got her first lead opposite Mahsun Kırmızıgül in Aşka Sürgün, then Yasemin Ünsal in Hatırla Sevgili, a period drama spanning two decades of Turkish history from the 1950s, alongside Cansel Elçin and Okan Yalabık. Giritlioğlu also gave her a first feature, Güz Sancısı, in which she played Elena, a Greek sex worker.

Then Kanal D cast her as Bihter. Aşk-ı Memnu, adapted from Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil’s novel and directed by Hilal Saral, follows a young wife who falls for her husband’s nephew Behlül, played by Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ. It drew a stream of complaints to the broadcasting regulator RTÜK and sharp words from ministers. It also won Saat the Golden Butterfly for best actress two years running, sold its format to Italy and the United States, and carried her face across the Middle East and Europe.

The next role was harder. In Fatmagül’ün Suçu Ne?, again for Saral and opposite Engin Akyürek, a friend from the same talent contest, she played a young woman living with the aftermath of a rape. She and several colleagues took psychological support before shooting the assault in the first episode. The series was raised in parliament and targeted by a campaign to pull it off air; abroad it put her on magazine covers in several countries, and Chile’s association of entertainment journalists gave her its award for best international actress.

That image had a price she has contested in public. On Serdar Akar’s Gecenin Kanatları, a sex scene with Murat Ünalmış ended up as the hook of the trailer. Saat objected, stayed away from the premiere, and was sued by the producer under her contract until he dropped the case in 2013. Her other films of those years look like a deliberate correction: Monica Bellucci’s daughter in Bahman Ghobadi’s Rhino Season, which premiered in Toronto, and the deaf and blind Ela in Benim Dünyam, Uğur Yücel’s remake of the Indian drama Black.

Television had two more turns in it. She took fight lessons to play the avenger of İntikam, the Turkish remake of Revenge, and then the title role in Muhteşem Yüzyıl: Kösem, joining the Ottoman palace saga in its seventh episode and leaving at the end of the first season, when Nurgül Yeşilçay took over the older sultana. It was her last series for a broadcast network.

The Gift, the Netflix original known at home as Atiye, cast her as a painter whose canvases lead her to the Neolithic site of Göbeklitepe; it ran for three seasons between December 2019 and June 2021 and brought her the best actress prize at the Golden Artemis awards of the Izmir International Film Festival. In Last Call for Istanbul, directed by Gönenç Uyanık and released in November 2023, she was reunited with Tatlıtuğ as two married strangers who meet at a New York airport and spend one night in the city.

The music is where the question of who she is now gets loudest. “CapitaliZoo”, released in February 2026 with her own English lyrics, production by her husband Kenan Doğulu and a mix by Brendan Morawski, carried the credit Beren and nothing else. Reaction on Turkish social media ran from mixed to scathing, and the Milliyet columnist Metin Aktaşoğlu built his verdict around why the song was neither good nor bad. The six-track EP Exuberance followed on 18 June through Dola Music, the label Doğulu founded, with Michael League of Snarky Puppy on bass. “Exuberance is about allowing yourself to be fully and unapologetically who you are,” she said in the release announcement. Her audience already has a firm idea of who that is, and it was formed in Turkish, in prime time.

The release landed in an awkward week. On 11 June police detained Saat and Doğulu in the Istanbul prosecutor’s investigation into drug use among celebrities. A court freed both the following day under judicial control, with a ban on leaving the country, and forensic results reported on 18 June came back negative for her and positive for Doğulu. No indictment against her had been reported by mid-October.

Saat and Doğulu began dating in 2012 and married in a private ceremony in Los Angeles in July 2014. Away from sets she gave her entire fee from a deodorant campaign to Mor Çatı, a women’s shelter foundation, and after the 2015 murder of Özgecan Aslan, a student killed while resisting a rape attempt, she wrote publicly about her own experience of being a woman in Turkey.

The next screen role is already shot. Gizli Profil, directed by Caner Alper and Mehmet Binay for OGM Pictures, casts her as Rengin, an investigative journalist who hides her identity to chase a story and finds her marriage and career shaken by a free-spirited woman played by Gamze Karaduman. Made with Prime Video in mind, it was booked into Turkish cinemas for 19 December 2025 and pulled days before opening, with the directors citing unfinished preparations; no new date has been set. When it does arrive, Saat will be playing a woman who builds a second identity to get the work done, which is roughly what she has been doing since Bihter.