Birkan Sokullu and the basketball career he finally gets to play

Birkan Sokullu

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

Born	October 6, 1985 Istanbul, Turkey
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Art of Love

The part Birkan Sokullu is shooting for Netflix reads like a page torn out of his own file. In Palas Pandıras, the new series from writer-director Selman Nacar, he plays Levent, a basketball player whose career ended before it had properly begun and who now builds a team out of five troubled high-school students with one goal: the Istanbul championship trophy. Sokullu spent about ten years playing basketball before a leg injury took the game away from him. Between that injury and this coach lies a screen career in which the camera mostly asked him to be somebody far from himself: an Ottoman prince, a Genoese mercenary, an immortal, a millionaire thief. The open question now is whether an actor long valued for his presence can carry a story built on a wound he knows from the inside.

He was born in Istanbul into a family of Bosnian immigrants and grew up on the court. Through secondary school he played for school teams and for the Tekel Spor club, and he stepped away from the sport when he started university. The face came next. As a teenager he placed third in the Best Model of Turkey contest, and he worked as a model while studying radio, television and cinema at Maltepe University. He later spent a year in the drama and acting department at Istanbul Aydın University and left without finishing. At twenty-one he lost his mother to a brain haemorrhage.

Acting arrived as an offer rather than a plan. When the series Elif approached him in 2008, he took lessons with the acting coach Dolunay Soysert and accepted. Parts in Küçük Kadınlar and the youth drama Melekler Korusun followed, and in 2010 he landed his first lead: Demir in Küçük Sırlar, the Turkish remake of Gossip Girl created by Timur Savcı, a character built on the outsider Dan Humphrey of the American original. The show began on Kanal D, moved to Star TV halfway through and ran to 55 episodes, long enough to fix him in the minds of a young audience.

The years that followed put him in costume. He played a journalist in the crime series Uçurum, Şehzade Mustafa in Fatih, and Petro Borinsky in Kurt Seyit ve Şura, the 2014 Star TV adaptation of Nermin Bezmen’s novel. His first major prime-time lead came with Hayat Şarkısı on Kanal D, a 57-episode drama written by Mahinur Ergun and directed by Cem Karcı, in which he played Kerim. In 2018 he joined Kerem Bürsin and Elçin Sangu in the BluTV vampire series Yaşamayanlar, and a year later he took a lead in the horror film Güzelliğin Portresi.

The turn came in 2020. Netflix cast him as Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, the Genoese commander on the walls of Constantinople in 1453, in the docudrama Rise of Empires: Ottoman, which put him in front of the platform’s international audience. Later that year he started the role that changed how Turkish viewers saw him. In Masumlar Apartmanı, adapted for TRT 1 from a chapter of the psychiatrist Gülseren Budayıcıoğlu’s book Madalyonun İçi, he played Han Derenoğlu, one of four siblings sharing a family house, a man who compulsively hoards rubbish. The series ran from September 2020 to May 2022, 71 episodes, alongside Ezgi Mola, Merve Dizdar and Farah Zeynep Abdullah. It asked him to be unkempt, frightened and stubborn for two seasons, and it is the work his career is now measured against.

The less flattering reading of Sokullu’s career is easy to assemble, and it is worth taking seriously. A former model with a basketball player’s frame, he has often been cast for how he looks in a period coat or a tailored suit, and several of those bets did not land. Kanal D pulled Fatih in November 2013 after five episodes because of low ratings. In Kurt Seyit ve Şura the story belonged to Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ and Farah Zeynep Abdullah. And Romantik Hırsız, released worldwide by Netflix as Art of Love in March 2024, paired him with Esra Bilgiç as a wealthy art thief pursued by the Interpol officer he once meant to marry; the critic at Beyazperde wrote that it followed the template of Hollywood romantic adventures step by step and fell into the genre’s clichés. The pattern says something unglamorous: the role that served him best, Han, was the one that stripped away everything the industry first hired him for.

His recent work has followed Turkish drama off the weekly network grid. On Star TV in 2023 he led Yüz Yıllık Mucize, playing a commander from the Battle of Sakarya who stops ageing and has to reinvent himself across a century. On the streaming service TOD he reunited with Esra Bilgiç in Zamanın Kapıları, as Sinan, an antisocial computer genius pulled into secrets from the past; the first season premiered in May 2024 and a second followed in June 2025. In May 2026 the platform tabii released P.A.Y., an eight-episode crime series about the theft of a painting by Osman Hamdi Bey, in which he shares the lead with Devrim Özkan, with Zafer Algöz in the cast.

His private life has been public twice over. He married the actress Aslı Enver in July 2012 and the couple divorced in August 2015. His partner is Eda Gürkaynak; asked about marriage at a theatre premiere in April 2026, he answered that everything was fine, that they were happy, and that people would find out when the time came.

What comes next is Palas Pandıras. Filming began in 2026 under Nacar, whose İstanbul Ansiklopedisi was his first series for Netflix, with Kuyu Films producing and Kaan Mirac Sezen sharing the lead; in the story, the team’s rebellious star player is the one who forces the coach to face his own mistakes. Yasemin Kay Allen plays Özge, Levent’s partner. Netflix has not yet announced a release date. There is a small rhyme in the casting: the character Sokullu played in Melekler Korusun, one of his first jobs, was also called Levent. Almost two decades later the name comes back to him attached to a basketball court, and to the version of his life he did not get to live.