Çağatay Ulusoy, the star of Netflix’s first Turkish series who went back to prime-time TV

Çağatay Ulusoy

Photo: LospollosRomania / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 23, 1990 Istanbul, Turkey
Occupation	Actor, model and director
Known for	Paper Lives, Delibal, A True Gentleman
Awards	Golden Butterfly · Best Model of Turkey

In Turkey, nobody has asked for years whether Çağatay Ulusoy can carry a series. The question is which screen he will carry it on. For half a decade he was the face Netflix used to introduce Turkish drama to the rest of the world: the lead of its first Turkish original, then a waste-paper collector with failing kidneys, a society tailor with a secret locked inside his own house and a young man convinced that God was writing to him through a messaging app. Then he walked back into the ratings war of Turkish prime time, the arena where he had started, and signed for a gangster love story on Kanal D that ran for two full seasons. His career has become a running negotiation between those two systems, and between the model’s face that got him hired and the damaged, sick or dangerous men he keeps choosing to play.

Ulusoy was born in Istanbul into a family shaped by two migrations. His paternal relatives, of Turkish descent, came to Turkey from Bulgaria, and his father crossed the border at the age of ten; his mother’s family is Bosniak and came from Bosnia and Herzegovina. He holds both Turkish and Bulgarian citizenship and has a younger brother, Atalay, who would later work beside him behind the camera. As a boy he was restless enough that his parents pushed him into sport early. He spent nine years believing he would be a professional basketball player, and he swam and dived competitively. After secondary school he enrolled in the garden design and landscaping programme at Istanbul University.

The degree lost out to the camera. Ulusoy was modelling in his teens, and his first screen credits were the kind that never make a showreel: a uniformed extra in the police series Arka Sokaklar and a dancer in the comedy Recep İvedik 3. In 2010, at 19, he won the Best Model of Turkey contest. That same night he was offered his first real acting job. Years later, already a star, he became the face of the jeans brand Colin’s and shot a campaign in the sea off Bodrum with the Victoria’s Secret model Taylor Hill, a reminder that the fashion industry never quite let him go.

From Feriha to Medcezir

The offer that night was Adını Feriha Koydum, known internationally as The Girl Named Feriha. From 2011 to 2012 he played Emir Sarrafoğlu, a rich young man drawn to a doorman’s daughter, opposite Hazal Kaya. The show became one of the defining Turkish romances of its period, and when its third season was relaunched under a new title, Emir’in Yolu, it was his character’s name that went on the poster. Between seasons he made his film debut in the military drama Anadolu Kartalları (2011), as Lieutenant Ahmet Onur.

Medcezir, which ran on Star TV from 2013 to 2015, was a loose adaptation of the American series The O.C., and it gave him the part that fixed his screen persona: Yaman Koper, a boy from a poor seaside neighbourhood absorbed into a wealthy family. The role won him the Golden Butterfly Award for Best Actor in 2015, the most visible popular prize in Turkish television. He used the momentum to do something riskier. In the film Delibal (2015) he played Barış Ayaz, an architecture student living with bipolar disorder, learned to play the drums for the part and sang on the soundtrack himself.

İçerde (2016–2017) moved him into crime. Directed by Uluç Bayraktar and partly inspired by Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed, the series cast him as Sarp Yılmaz, a police officer sent to live inside a criminal organisation, opposite Aras Bulut İynemli as the gangster’s protégé who has infiltrated the police. It was the first time he carried a story built on menace rather than romance, and audiences followed him there.

The Netflix years

When Netflix commissioned its first Turkish original series, it chose Ulusoy. The Protector (Hakan: Muhafız), launched in December 2018, made him Hakan Demir, a young shopkeeper in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar who discovers he is the last of a line of guardians charged with protecting the city from immortal enemies. The fantasy series ran for four seasons and 32 episodes until 2020, and it was the show that introduced him to viewers who had never watched a Turkish television drama.

The streaming years that followed are where his choices became most interesting. In Paper Lives (Kağıttan Hayatlar, 2021), directed by Can Ulkay, he played Mehmet, a sick waste-paper collector who looks after a group of homeless children on the streets of Istanbul while saving for a kidney transplant; the film climbed Netflix’s Top 10 on its release that March. In Yeşilçam (2021) he was Semih Ateş, a producer in the golden age of Turkish cinema. The Tailor (Terzi, 2023), written by Rana Mamatlıoğlu and Bekir Baran Sıtkı, directed by Cem Karcı and indirectly based on Gülseren Budayıcıoğlu’s book Hayata Dön, made him Peyami Dokumacı, a celebrated Istanbul tailor whose polished life rests on a family secret; it ran for three seasons and 23 episodes. In Kübra (2024), adapted from Afşin Kum’s novel and directed by the brothers Durul and Yağmur Taylan, he was Gökhan Şahinoğlu, an ordinary young man who starts receiving messages from an account he comes to believe is God. The Netflix film A True Gentleman (Tam Bir Centilmen), released on September 26, 2024, and directed by Onur Bilgetay, cast him as Saygın, a gigolo to wealthy women who falls for Nehir, played by Ebru Şahin; Netflix’s own figures counted 4.9 million views in its first four days.

He also started directing. In Los Angeles in 2016 he made a short about homelessness, Home. His second short, Birdie (2021), which he wrote and directed with his brother Atalay as assistant director, follows a fisherman who enters a local competition to pay for the treatment of an injured falcon. Turgay Tanülkü, who had acted with him in Paper Lives, played the lead. The 21-minute film was selected by the Oxford Film Festival and won the award for best editing in a short film at the Newport Beach Film Festival.

The picture the posters leave out

The glossy version of his career has always skipped the setbacks. In January 2013, at the height of Feriha‘s success, he was one of several performers taken into custody in an Istanbul narcotics investigation. In 2018 a trial court sentenced him to four years and two months on trafficking-related charges; on appeal the case was retried, and in May 2019 the appellate court reduced it to ten months for buying and possessing drugs for personal use, deferring the pronouncement of the verdict for five years, a mechanism under Turkish law that allows a case to be closed if the defendant commits no further offence. The episode followed him through the entire Netflix period, yet it never cost him a lead.

Ratings did. Gaddar, his 2024 return to broadcast television on NOW, cast him as Dağhan Yalçın in a revenge drama built squarely around his star power. It did not find its audience and ended after 20 episodes, with a finale on June 7, 2024. For an actor whose name had been treated as a guarantee, it was a public correction. It also exposed the weakness of the pin-up label that has followed him since the modelling contest: the parts that earned him the most attention, from Barış in Delibal to Mehmet in Paper Lives, were the ones that worked against his looks, while the vehicle designed purely around him stalled.

Eşref Rüya, Uykucu and what comes next

His answer was to go bigger on the same terrain. In September 2024 the newspaper Cumhuriyet reported that the production company Tims&B had signed him for 3.5 million lira per episode, a figure it described as the highest ever paid to a Turkish actor. The series was Eşref Rüya, which premiered on Kanal D on March 19, 2025, with Bayraktar, his İçerde director, behind the camera and a script by Ethem Özışık. Ulusoy played Eşref Tek, an underworld figure in love with a woman whose name he does not know, opposite Demet Özdemir as Nisan, a young musician. The first four episodes were also released on YouTube, and later episodes streamed in Turkey on Prime Video the day after broadcast. In June 2026, as social media filled with claims of a crisis on set, the producers issued a statement saying he was neither leaving nor being fired and calling the rumours baseless. The series closed after two seasons and 47 episodes on June 10, 2026.

In between, he returned to cinemas. Uykucu (The Sleeper), his second film with Can Ulkay, written by Kubilay Tat, cast him as Ferman, a hitman who eliminates former agents for a secret organisation until one assignment brings him face to face with Saye, played by Elçin Sangu, and he spares her. Released on October 29, 2025, Turkey’s Republic Day, it sold 103,181 tickets on its first day, 221,155 in five days and 382,299 in its first twelve.

Ulusoy turned 36 on September 23, 2026. With Eşref Rüya finished, he has not yet officially announced his next series, and that silence is itself a statement about his leverage: he no longer needs to choose between Netflix and broadcast television, because both have paid him to be the lead. What remains open is the choice he has returned to repeatedly since Delibal, whether the next part asks audiences to admire the face or to look past it.