Elçin Sangu, the Kiralık Aşk star whose biggest audience came with a thriller

Elçin Sangu

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

Born	August 13, 1985 İzmir, Turkey
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Leyla Everlasting
Awards	Altın Kelebek (Golden Butterfly) · Altın Kelebek (Golden Butterfly) (shared)

Funda, the painter Elçin Sangu plays in Netflix‘s Not a Stranger, wants one modest thing: to get back to her canvases now that the baby has arrived. To manage it she hires a nanny, a young woman called Nazlı, and lets a stranger sleep down the hall. The eight episodes that follow are a slow loss of control over her own house, and they have given the Turkish actress the biggest audience of her career. There is a quiet irony in that. For most of a decade, viewers at home knew her best as a woman who had been paid to make a man fall in love with her.

The man was Ömer İplikçi, played by Barış Arduç, and the series was Kiralık Aşk. Sangu was Defne Topal, a waitress who agrees to take money from Ömer’s aunt to marry him and then walk out, because her brother owes the wrong people. The romantic comedy on Star TV turned the pair into a fixture of every Turkish entertainment page. At the Golden Butterfly Awards, the Altın Kelebek, the two of them took the couple prize, and the following year she won best actress in a comedy series on her own.

The series stayed on air for 69 episodes, from June 2015 to January 2017, and the couple prize came in its first autumn. Defne also became a business. Shampoo brand Elidor and the retailer Boyner hired Sangu as their face in 2016, and CNN Türk reported that the two advertising deals she accepted would bring her around three million lira in a single year. By September 2016 she was among the ten most followed Turkish celebrities on Instagram. The publicity machine was bigger than any single role she had played.

None of it was the plan she started with. The only child of a Circassian family, born in İzmir on 13 August 1985, Sangu trained as a singer before she trained as an actress. She graduated from the opera department of Mersin University’s state conservatory and then took acting classes at the Sahne Tozu Theatre back in İzmir. Her first television part that viewers remembered was Jale in Öyle Bir Geçer Zaman ki, a role in which she sang and played the piano on screen, and which one Milliyet columnist summed up as the show’s bad girl.

Leads arrived slowly. She played Eda in Bir Aşk Hikayesi, FOX’s remake of the Korean drama I’m Sorry, I Love You, and then Güzide in Kurt Seyit ve Şura, the Star TV adaptation of Nermin Bezmen’s novel, shot across Russia, Turkey and Ukraine. Planned and sold abroad as a longer run, the period piece ended after 21 episodes when the ratings failed to come. A lead in atv’s Sevdam Alabora followed, and then Defne.

The conservatory never quite left her work. When she and Arduç reunited for Şenol Sönmez’s film Mutluluk Zamanı, she also sang on its soundtrack. In 2022 she went further and took the role of Lucy in the Turkish production of the musical Jekyll & Hyde at Zorlu PSM in Istanbul, opposite the rock singer Hayko Cepkin as the doctor and his double.

What followed Kiralık Aşk on screen reads like a deliberate search for darker material. On the streaming service BluTV she was Mia in Yaşamayanlar, a vampire stalking the man who turned her, played by Kerem Bürsin, because killing him is her only way back to being human. In Show TV’s Çarpışma, opposite Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ, she played Zeynep Tunç, a bank manager who robs her own bank to pay off the gangsters holding her daughter. Ezel Akay then cast her in Leyla Everlasting, a black comedy with Demet Akbağ and Haluk Bilginer that was meant for cinemas until the pandemic sent it to Netflix in December 2020.

The record also has a less flattering column, and it matters for reading her career honestly. İyi Günde Kötü Günde, a Star TV romantic comedy in which her Leyla has to organise the wedding of the man who left her at the altar, ended with its sixth episode in October 2020. Yalancılar ve Mumları, FOX’s version of the BBC drama Mistresses, was pulled after five episodes the following year when its ratings lagged. Turkish broadcast television is brutal with numbers, and Sangu is far from its only casualty. The pattern is hard to miss all the same. The advertising fame had run ahead of the work: every new series was sold, and judged, as the return of Defne, and when a show offered something else the network audience did not wait for it. Çöp Adam, opposite Engin Altan Düzyatan, did last two seasons and 30 episodes, closing in October 2023, though it never matched the earlier phenomenon.

The last two years have looked more like a reset than a comeback. In 2025 she hosted Elçin Sangu ile 101 on the platform GAİN, a ten-episode series that put questions such as astrology’s revival or artificial intelligence to expert guests. On 29 October 2025 the action film Uykucu, directed by Can Ulkay, opened in Turkish cinemas with Sangu as Saye, the woman a hitman played by Çağatay Ulusoy is sent to eliminate and chooses to recruit instead.

Then came Not a Stranger, released as Seni Tanıyorum in Turkey. Created and written by Tuğba Doğan and directed by Mert Baykal, with Melis Sezen as Nazlı and Ozan Dolunay as Funda’s husband İlker, it dropped all eight episodes worldwide on 17 September 2026. Netflix’s weekly figures put it second among non-English series in its first week with 4.6 million views, then first in its second week with 9.7 million. Its 14.3 million views in ten days made it, by that count, the strongest launch among Turkish Netflix originals, ahead of Old Money and The Tailor.

Netflix has not announced a second season, and Sangu has not confirmed her next role. Whatever she signs next will be measured against Funda rather than Defne, and for an actress whose name sold shampoo before it sold thrillers, that is the first real change of reference in ten years.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ, Barış Arduç, Elçin Sangu, Not a Stranger

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