Ezgi Mola, the comedy lead who had to stop being funny to be taken seriously

Ezgi Mola

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

Born	March 29, 1983 Istanbul, Turkey
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Magic Carpet Ride, The Magician, Butterflies
Awards	Golden Butterfly (shared) · Sadri Alışık

For most of her career the Turkish public met Ezgi Mola mid-laugh. She was the hairdresser with more heart than sense, the romantic-comedy lead who out-talked everyone around her, the improviser trading lines with Tolga Çevik in front of a live audience. Then the state broadcaster cast her as a woman who cannot stop cleaning, a sister so bound to her mother’s example that every gesture looks like a reflex, and viewers who had filed her under comedy found an actress of unusual control. The question her career asks now is whether she can keep both doors open. This month she walked back through the first one, rejoining the gang of Yılmaz Erdoğan’s Organize İşler in a Netflix series.

Mola grew up in Istanbul, in a family with roots in Malatya. She was still in high school when she signed up for acting classes at the Müjdat Gezen Arts Center, and she stayed four years, finishing first in her department. Before she came of age she had already worked on a television set, in Kartal Tibet’s series Karate Can. Two more years of training with the theatre director Aydoğan Temel gave her a first stage role, in his company’s production of Çürük Elma.

The door to a wide audience opened in the autumn of 2005. In November she joined BKM Mutfak, the comedy workshop of the Istanbul production house BKM, and that season she played Gülay, a naive hairdresser, in the series Hırsız Polis, the part that made her face familiar across the country. She also turned up in Erdoğan’s crime comedy Organize İşler, the first chapter of a franchise she would come back to twice.

The industry’s view of her changed a year later. Uğur Yücel, who had shared the screen with her in Hırsız Polis, directed her in Hayatımın Kadınısın opposite Türkan Şoray, a scene partner Mola had long treated as a personal goal, and the role earned her the Sadri Alışık Award for best supporting actress in 2007. She stayed in his orbit with the family series Canım Ailem and with Kolay Gelsin, an improvised sitcom he directed without a fixed script, a first for Turkish television that did not last. Period work followed, with Zülfü Livaneli’s Veda, in which she played Latife Hanım, and Kötü Yol, a series adapted from a classic novel.

The bigger audiences, though, came through comedy. On television she worked alongside Tolga Çevik in Arkadaşım Hoşgeldin, an improvisation show that put her timing on weekly display. In cinema she took the lead opposite Şahan Gökbakar in Celal ile Ceren, directed by Togan Gökbakar, and then carried Kıvanç Baruönü’s Kocan Kadar Konuş, released in English as Husband Factor, a hit that produced a sequel, Kocan Kadar Konuş: Diriliş, a year later. Advertising made her a fixture between programmes, from toothpaste campaigns to a long run as the face of a bank.

That success came with a cost that her filmography makes visible. Through the 2010s Mola was running two careers in parallel, and only one of them was seen by the mass audience. The poster version promised domestic comedy, fast talk and a heroine who wins the argument. The other version sat at the edges: a supporting part in Tolga Karaçelik’s Kelebekler, which won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for drama at Sundance in 2018, and a role in Reha Erdem’s Seni Buldum Ya! three years later. Neither moved the public image much. Even the prize that finally did was shared: her Golden Butterfly for best actress was split with her co-star Merve Dizdar, which says as much about the strength of the ensemble around her as about her own work.

That ensemble was Masumlar Apartmanı, broadcast on TRT 1 from September 2020 to May 2022 across 71 episodes and adapted from a chapter of the psychiatrist Gülseren Budayıcıoğlu’s book Madalyonun İçi. Mola played Safiye Derenoğlu, one of the sisters in a household of siblings shaped by obsessive habits and by the shadow of their mother. The comic precision audiences already knew became something harder to watch: rituals performed with total conviction, fear dressed up as order. The 47th Golden Butterfly Awards gave her and Dizdar the best actress prize, and the series became the reference point for anyone arguing that Mola had been underused.

Streaming offered a third register. In Cem Yılmaz’s Erşan Kuneri, released by Netflix as The Life and Movies of Erşan Kuneri, she played Alev Alev, an actress who keeps reappearing in the hero’s parade of genre films, a role that let her comedy and her self-awareness sit in the same scene. She also played the Queen of Hearts in Alice Müzikali, a musical take on Lewis Carroll.

The recent stretch has been less linear. In 2025 she led Başka Bir Gün on atv, the Turkish adaptation of the BBC drama Keeping Faith, as Nehir Alsoy, a lawyer raised in a children’s home who had stepped away from her profession for her family; the series ended in April after 10 episodes, a short life by the standards of Turkish network drama. The same spring she appeared in Ömer Faruk Sorak’s film Başka Bir Sen. In the summer of 2026 she opened a venue in Alaçatı, Kadehler Arasında, with her friend Bengi Apak, and part of the Turkish press read it as a step away from acting. Mola, who was born in Istanbul on 29 March 1983, married Mustafa Aksakallı in May 2023, and the couple have a son, Can.

The step away proved short. Organize İşler: Karun Hazinesi, an eight-episode series written by and starring Erdoğan as Asım Noyan and directed by Şenol Sönmez, premiered on Netflix on 16 October 2026, with Mola back as Lerzan, the character she played in the 2019 film Organize İşler: Sazan Sarmalı, alongside Demet Akbağ and Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ. It returns her to the comedy that built her name, now in front of a global streaming audience that has never seen Safiye scrub a floor. What she does after that, with both versions of herself on the record, is the part of the story that is still unwritten.

Featured Films

Butterflies (2018) — Money Trap (2019) — as Lerzan Berrak

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