Hazar Ergüçlü, the Turkish Cypriot actress who chose to mother a monster

Hazar Ergüçlü

Photo: Everwest / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 1, 1993 Nicosia, Cyprus
Occupation	Actress and producer
Known for	The Wild Pear Tree, My World
Awards	Turkish Film Critics Association (SİYAD) · Adana Golden Boll Film Festival Best Actress, Mutter: The Diary of a Mother · Adana Golden Boll Film Festival Most Promising Young Actress, Kar · Frankfurt Turkish Film Festival Best Actress, Kar · Sadri Alışık · Golden Objektif

For more than two years, Turkish television viewers knew Hazar Ergüçlü as a nightclub dancer in a prime-time melodrama, playing opposite the man who wrote it. The role that is winning her prizes this autumn is a young woman who gives birth, on the back seat of a car on an empty road near the Black Sea, to a creature that is not entirely human. She co-produced that second film, Mutter: The Diary of a Mother, and has taken it from New York to Adana to Sitges. Turkish television made her famous. The choices that tested her came from cinema, and she has started producing some of them herself.

Ergüçlü grew up in the northern part of Nicosia, on the Turkish Cypriot side of the divided island. She has said that her grandparents on her mother’s side were labourers who worked in banana plantations and coal pits, that her grandfather spent years in a mine, and that she grew up around that work. She once described the island in terms of “a terrible neighbourhood pressure hiding behind a European identity”, a place where a young woman could go out at night in shorts and a bikini top as long as she accepted that people would curse her the moment she walked past.

She was doing youth theatre with the Nicosia Turkish Municipality when the director Derviş Zaim cast her as Ruhsar in Gölgeler ve Suretler (Shadows and Faces), his 2010 drama about a girl fleeing the 1963 fighting between Turkish and Greek Cypriots. By her own account she was 17 when she started. The performance earned her a Best Actress nomination from the Turkish Film Critics Association (SİYAD). She also trained in theatre at the conservatory of Haliç University in Istanbul. Television found her quickly: she played Simay in Kuzey Güney, the Kanal D brothers’ drama with Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ that ran from 2011 to 2013, and then Eylül Buluter in Medcezir, Star TV’s adaptation of The O.C., from 2013 to 2015. Leads in Yüksek Sosyete and Hayat Sırları followed.

The change of direction came through two films released almost back to back. In Emre Erdoğdu’s Kar (“Snow”, 2017) she played Müzeyyen, and the part brought her a promising young actress award at the Adana Golden Boll festival and, at the 2019 ceremony, SİYAD’s Best Actress prize. “I’m also a type who swears a lot and gets perceived like Müzeyyen, made into an outsider,” she told Cumhuriyet in 2018, “even though I’m not like that at all.” Nuri Bilge Ceylan then cast her as Hatice in The Wild Pear Tree, which competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2018. Hatice is an old acquaintance of Sinan, the restless would-be writer: she kisses him beneath a tree and then marries another man, as if marriage were her only way out. Ergüçlü shot her scenes in four days. Ceylan had her play each moment several ways, once smiling, and she said she left the set with no limit untested.

In December 2018 Netflix launched The Protector, its first Turkish original series, and Ergüçlü played Zeynep Erman across four seasons opposite Çağatay Ulusoy, her co-star from Medcezir. The part won her a Golden Objektif award. She led Alev Alev from 2020 to 2021 as Çiçek, a woman whose appearance and outlook are both changed by a fire. In August 2022 Netflix released Heartsong, in which she played Sümbül, and the comedy brought her a Sadri Alışık award. She also moved behind the camera: she was among the producers of Beni Sevenler Listesi, a later film by Erdoğdu, which won the Golden Tulip for best film in the national competition of the Istanbul Film Festival in 2021, and of Bomboş, directed by her then partner Onur Ünlü, in which she also took a small role. The couple, together since 2018, separated at the end of 2022. “Breakups are part of love too,” she said at the time.

The record has a less flattering side. Much of the prime-time work that sustained her career was imported formats: Medcezir was The O.C., the BluTV series Saklı was a version of The Affair, and Hayat Bugün was a version of New Amsterdam. Outside Turkey, her best-known film parts before this year were supporting ones, starting with a handful of scenes in a Ceylan epic. And her most-watched recent role arrived wrapped in controversy. In Yılmaz Erdoğan’s İnci Taneleri, which Kanal D aired from January 2024 to March 2026, she played Dilber, a dancer in a pavyon, the hostess clubs of Turkish nightlife. The dance attracted criticism before the series had even aired, with detractors dismissing it as club dancing. Mustafa Erdoğan, artistic director of the dance company Anatolian Fire and the writer’s brother, defended it as a regional dance from Ankara; one of his dancers had trained her. The role earned her a Golden Butterfly nomination for Best Actress. Ergüçlü has never pretended to fit the industry’s mould. “I will never be someone compliant and prim and proper,” she said in 2018.

Her two most recent films are the most interesting ones. In Alireza Khatami’s The Things You Kill, which premiered in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance in January 2025 and won its directing award, she plays Hazar, the wife of a literature professor played by Ekin Koç, her co-star from Hayat Sırları. Canada selected the film as its submission for the Best International Feature Oscar; it was not nominated. Then came Mutter: The Diary of a Mother, Alphan Eşeli’s horror film, shot on the Black Sea coast in 2024. Ergüçlü plays Gül, whose husband runs away at the first sight of their newborn, leaving her alone with the child in a crumbling house. The film had its world premiere on 6 June 2026 at the Tribeca Festival in New York, in its genre section Escape from Tribeca. Reviewing it for ScreenAnarchy, Olga Artemyeva read it as a story about “the reality of single motherhood in an inherently flawed patriarchal society”.

At the 33rd Adana Golden Boll festival in early October 2026 the role won her Best Actress. She used her speech to talk about Yaşar, the 13-year-old boy who would not leave the coffin of his father, a miner killed in a collapse at Soma. “I am ashamed of the breath I take. I apologise to Yaşar,” she said. She later explained that she had written the speech on the plane. Within days the film was in Spain for the main competition of the Sitges festival, with screenings on 12 and 13 October.

Mutter: The Diary of a Mother is due in Turkish cinemas on 27 November 2026. It will be the first time Turkish audiences can judge, outside the festival circuit, a lead performance in a film she helped get made.

Tags: actresses, Yılmaz Erdoğan, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, The Things You Kill, Hazar Ergüçlü, İnci Taneleri