Ekin Koç, the Turkish actor who built a Cannes résumé while sustaining a primetime TV career

Ekin Koç

Photo: Everwest / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 21, 1992 Manavgat, Antalya, Turkey
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Champion, Burning Days, Make Me Believe
Awards	Ayhan Işık Special

There is a quality Ekin Koç brings to the men he plays that is difficult to name precisely. Not vulnerability — that word is too gentle. Something closer to the appearance of certainty that conceals, at a critical depth, a structure beginning to give way. In Kurak Günler — released internationally as Burning Days — his local journalist Murat watches a young prosecutor disrupt the entrenched power structures of a small Anatolian town. The film’s most unsettling element is not the political corruption it anatomizes but the way Murat’s admiration for the newcomer keeps sliding into something he cannot quite name or entirely own. In The Things You Kill, his professor Ali returns to Turkey from more than a decade in the United States, only to find himself soliciting an act of vengeance, his sense of self dissolving through the process. Both characters believe they understand the rules. Both films are about the moment that understanding cracks open.

He was born İsmet Ekin Koç in Manavgat, a coastal city in Antalya province where summer fills the hotels and autumn empties them. His father worked in tourism; his mother in banking. After high school, he moved to Istanbul — the expected move for a young Anatolian with ambitions — and enrolled in Business Administration at Istanbul Bilgi University. The pivot toward acting happened in parallel: he began training in 2011 at a studio in Istanbul and committed to the craft before finishing his studies.

His first sustained television role came in 2013, in Sana Bir Sır Vereceğim, a romantic drama opposite Demet Özdemir. The show established his face with an audience before he had a body of work that would justify it on its own terms. Two years later he was cast in Muhteşem Yüzyıl: Kösem, the Ottoman historical epic, as Sultan Ahmed I — the young sultan who ascended at fourteen and died at twenty-seven of typhus. The role required formal, composed authority within one of Turkish television’s most lavish productions, and he carried it across both seasons.

The film work arrived in parallel, not as an afterthought. Senden Bana Kalan, his first leading film role, won him the Ayhan Işık Special Award. In 2016, the British co-production Ali and Nino — which had premiered at the Sundance Film Festival — gave him early international exposure in a supporting role. The decisive shift toward the festival circuit came with Okul Tıraşı, directed by Ferit Karahan, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival. As Teacher Selim, Koç occupied the film’s morally ambiguous center: a man aware of an injustice unfolding in front of him, calculating the cost of each moment he waits before intervening.

Kurak Günler — directed by Emin Alper and selected for Un Certain Regard at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival — pushed that ambiguity further. The film used a water crisis in rural Anatolia to examine how authoritarian local power reproduces itself, and placed Koç in a dynamic with lead actor Selahattin Paşalı that became the work’s most discussed element: an unresolved closeness between the two men that the film never names and never dismisses. Neither character claims what is forming between them. The tension holds to the final frame, and Koç plays it with precisely the opacity the script demands.

None of this interrupted the television work. During the same years he was playing Efe Tekin in Üç Kuruş, a Turkish crime thriller series, and in 2024 he led Taş Kağıt Makas. The festival career and the television career did not trade off against each other — they ran in parallel, which tells you something about how he manages the professional double life that most comparable actors eventually have to choose between. The critical establishment and the mass audience have both kept showing up, for different reasons, and he has not given either a reason to stop.

The most significant international recognition came with The Things You Kill, directed by Iranian-Turkish filmmaker Alireza Khatami and presented at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Directing Award in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition. Koç plays Ali, a university professor who returns to Turkey after more than a decade studying English literature abroad. What begins as a psychologically compressed study of identity and masculine disorientation escalates into something considerably darker — a doom-laden exploration, as critics described it, of what happens when a man’s sense of self stops holding. The film was selected as Turkey’s submission for the International Feature Film category at the 98th Academy Awards and acquired for North American distribution by Cineverse.

More recently, Koç appeared in Vicdansız — released internationally as Another Chance — a miniseries that premiered in December 2025. He currently leads Muhtemel Aşk, a romantic series that premiered in June 2026, playing architect Kadir Emindağ opposite Ayça Ayşin Turan. The festival-circuit actor and the television star continue to share the same face. For now, Ekin Koç seems disinclined to resolve the tension between them, and both careers keep running.

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