Gürgen Öz, the Turkish actor who turned the sidekick’s charm into menace

Gürgen Öz

Photo: IPD POST PRODUCTIONS / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 10, 1978 Zonguldak, Turkey
Occupation	Actor
Known for	The Magician, Chokehold, A Romantic Comedy

There is a kind of Turkish screen face that audiences trust on sight: the friend who lends the hero his car, the colleague with a joke ready before the scene needs one. Gürgen Öz wore that face for the better part of two decades, from Cem Yılmaz’s Hokkabaz to the romantic comedy Bay Yanlış, beside Can Yaman. Lately he has been doing something else with it. In Onur Saylak’s Netflix thriller Chokehold and as a Spanish mercenary on the state broadcaster’s Mehmed: Fetihler Sultanı, the same open features have started to read as a warning, and his newest film, KUL dilemma, is built on exactly that.

The change is less of a reinvention than it looks. Öz came out of a drama conservatory and a municipal stage, and the first television work that got him noticed was improvisation performed live, with no script and no second take. Actors trained that way learn early that charm is a tool. A tool can be pointed in another direction.

He was born on 10 May 1978 in Zonguldak, the coal-mining city on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, and finished middle and high school at TED Zonguldak Koleji before moving to Istanbul. He gave a year to art history at Istanbul University, then sat the entrance exams for the acting programme of Mimar Sinan University’s State Conservatory and got in. While still a student he wrote a play of his own, Alman Satrancı.

After the conservatory came the unglamorous circuit of independent companies touring festivals in Turkey and abroad, and then contracts with the Bakırköy Municipal Theatres and the State Theatres. At Bakırköy he took the lead in Yaşar Kemal’s Teneke, in a staging directed by Müşfik Kenter, the last production the veteran actor worked on. It is the kind of credit that rarely makes a television profile, and the one that explains most of what came later.

Television arrived through a side door. Between 2005 and 2007 he was part of Televizyon Makinası, a late-night programme on which he performed live improvisation, something Turkish television had never broadcast before. He kept writing in the margins: a short documentary on unplanned urbanisation, Neden Böyle, in 2008; short stories in themed anthologies; and in 2013 a slim book of his own, Nevrotik.

The series work built steadily. Aşk Oyunu kept him on screen for 47 episodes as Serkan. He then joined Avrupa Yakası, Sinan Çetin’s atv sitcom and a ratings record-breaker in its day, in its later seasons as Cesur, and left after the New Year episode. Cinema followed: Cem Yılmaz and Ali Taner Baltacı’s Hokkabaz, released abroad as The Magician, in 2006; the two Romantik Komedi films, in 2010 and 2013, as Yiğit; and Zaman Makinesi 1973, the 2014 time-travel comedy directed by Aram Gülyüz, in which he finally carried the lead. He played Tolga, a careless heir whose only inheritance, an Anadol car, sends him back to the summer of 1973.

That lead did not become a run of leads, and here the public version of Öz gets thin. Turkish entertainment press still files him under the sitcom. When TRT 1 signed him for Mehmed: Fetihler Sultanı in early 2025, Haber7 introduced him as a face from Avrupa Yakası, a show where his stint was brief, and noted in the same breath that he had not appeared in a TV series for a long time. The decade after Zaman Makinesi 1973 mostly gave him supporting parts, among them Levent Yazman, opposite Can Yaman and Özge Gürel, in Bay Yanlış, the 2020 FOX romantic comedy that travelled abroad as Mr. Wrong. Those jobs were steady and visible. They also kept the conservatory-trained improviser, the one who writes, almost entirely off screen.

The correction came from a thriller. Chokehold, Onur Saylak’s film from a script by the novelist Hakan Günday, premiered at the Istanbul Film Festival under its Turkish title, Boğa Boğa, and reached Netflix on 21 April 2023. Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ and Funda Eryiğit play an Istanbul couple who escape a scandal for a town on the Aegean coast, only to find the locals want them gone. As Daim, Öz is part of the town that closes in on them, and MCM’s review of the film singled him out for making an impression without needing many lines.

Mehmed: Fetihler Sultanı, TRT 1’s period drama about the Ottoman sultan who took Constantinople, pushed the turn further. He entered from its 34th episode as Don Francesco, and described the part to TGRT Haber without any coyness: “The character I play, Don Francesco, is a Spanish sailor, a famous commander and a feared warrior.” He called him a very enjoyable villain to play, with a story grounded in historical fact.

Then, on 10 April 2026, KUL dilemma opened in Turkish cinemas. Mehmet Emin Yıldırım wrote and directed the psychological thriller, shot it in Istanbul’s Beykoz and Fatih districts, and gave the leads to Yiğit Çelebi and Öz. Öz plays Fosfor, a childhood friend who resurfaces one night after years of silence and drags a buried past into the open, which is to say the friend role again, this time with the warmth turned inside out.

No new role has been announced since KUL dilemma. What the last three years have settled is more useful to him than stardom: Turkish directors now know that the man who spent twenty years as the friend can be cast as the threat, and that audiences will believe him in both.

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Tags: actors, Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ, Turkish cinema, Chokehold, Onur Saylak, Gürgen Öz

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