Melis Sezen, the Actress Turkish TV Keeps Casting as the Intruder

Melis Sezen

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	January 2, 1997 Silivri, Istanbul, Turkey
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Champion
Awards	Golden Butterfly Awards

Melis Sezen’s best-known character spent two seasons as the reason a marriage came apart. In Sadakatsiz, Kanal D’s version of the BBC‘s Doctor Foster, she played Derin, the young woman a married man had been seeing for two years behind his wife’s back, and a large slice of Turkey’s television audience learned her face as the face of the other woman. On Netflix she now plays Nazlı, a nanny who makes herself indispensable to a family and then gets far too close to it. Between those two parts sits the real question about her career: whether an actress this convincing as the person who does not belong can get the industry to hand her anything else.

She grew up in Silivri, the coastal district on Istanbul’s western edge, where she was born into a family that works in trade, with Albanian roots from Macedonia on her father’s side and a maternal line that came from Thessaloniki. Drama classes started when she was twelve. It was her mother, she has said, who noticed the pull toward acting and enrolled her at the Müjdat Gezen Art Center, where she spent a year in theatre training before her first stage work at home, in the play Cümbüş-ü Hospital at Silivri’s Ali Solmaz Theatre. She kept studying through all of it and graduated from Koç University in media and visual arts.

Television let her in through the side door. Her first regular parts came on Star TV in 2016, the year she turned nineteen (she was born on 2 January 1997), as Asya Turan in Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır and as Ebru in Siyah İnci, ensemble work that taught her the punishing rhythm of the Turkish dizi, shot week to week for episodes that can run past two hours. Cinema arrived through small independent films such as Dünya Hali, then a first serious screen role in Bizim İçin Şampiyon, Ahmet Katıksız’s 2018 film about the racehorse Bold Pilot and the jockey Halis Karataş. A year later she played Beren in Mahsun Kırmızıgül’s Mucize 2: Aşk.

The leading roles came in 2019, and they came short. She was Yasemin Adıvar in Leke on Kanal D and Deren Kutlu in Sevgili Geçmiş on Star TV, two series that lasted seventeen episodes between them. TRT 1 then cast her as Nazan in Ya İstiklal Ya Ölüm, a 2020 historical miniseries set during the Allied occupation of Istanbul after the First World War, a period register far removed from the contemporary romances around it.

Sadakatsiz changed the scale. The series ran on Kanal D from October 2020 to May 2022, sixty episodes over two seasons, with Cansu Dere as Asya, the doctor who discovers the affair, and Caner Cindoruk as Volkan, the husband. Mike Bartlett’s original is built around the wife’s point of view, and the Turkish version kept that, which handed Sezen the trickier assignment: play the woman the audience is designed to resent, and give her enough inner life that the second season, with Derin married into the family she broke, still holds. In 2021 the Golden Butterfly Awards named her among that year’s rising stars. Advertisers followed, with campaigns for Turkcell opposite Barış Arduç, then Turkish Airlines and Lexus, which took her to the Venice Film Festival in 2025.

The roles that came after were bigger on paper. In Gülcemal, on Fox in 2023, she carried the lead as Deva Nakkaşoğlu opposite Murat Ünalmış; the series stopped after thirteen episodes at home but travelled, reaching Italian viewers on Canale 5 as La rosa della vendetta. In Deha, Ay Yapım’s action drama built around Aras Bulut İynemli and sold abroad as The Good & The Bad, she played İmre through thirty-one episodes on Show TV, and the series won the International Emmy for best telenovela in November 2025. On the big screen she was Mediha, the pianist wife of the composer Ahmet Adnan Saygun, in Bir Cumhuriyet Şarkısı, a 2024 film about the making of the opera Özsoy, and Asena in Onur Ünlü’s Şımarık.

The trouble shows in the record itself. The image the public holds of her was fixed by a supporting character in somebody else’s story, and the leads that might have revised it kept getting cut short. Leke and Sevgili Geçmiş were gone within months; Gülcemal ended at thirteen episodes in a market where a hit runs for seasons. Show TV’s Delikanlı, in which she played Hazan opposite Mert Ramazan Demir, premiered in April 2026 and closed after seven episodes in May, with Turkish press reports pointing to ratings that could not carry one of the season’s costliest productions. Turkish broadcast television cancels fast and in public, so none of this is a judgment on her acting. It does mean that her longest showcase is still a role written to be disliked, and that viewers have watched her more often as the obstacle than as the centre.

Streaming has offered another route. In May 2026 tabii, the TRT platform, released all ten episodes of Leyla Hâli, with Sezen as Leyla, a young woman who dreams of opening a restaurant where only people who are already full may sit down. Then on 17 September came Not a Stranger (Seni Tanıyorum), Tuğba Doğan’s eight-episode thriller directed by Mert Baykal, with Elçin Sangu as Funda, a painter who hires help so she can get back to her studio, and Sezen as the nanny she lets in. The first week brought 4.6 million views on Netflix, the biggest opening any Turkish series has had on the service. The casting was knowing. The actress the country remembers inside another couple’s marriage now plays a woman inside another family’s home.

The day after that premiere, Sezen was among fifteen people detained in a drug investigation run by the Bakırköy chief public prosecutor’s office in Istanbul. In her statement she said she had never used drugs and offered to take any test, and she was released after examinations at the Forensic Medicine Institute. On 30 September she published the institute’s report, which found no narcotic, stimulant or medicinal substance in her blood, urine or hair. No charge against her has been reported.

Her next lead has not been announced. She goes into that decision holding something the broadcast cancellations never gave her, a launch figure nobody can argue with. The choice she makes next will show whether she plays the intruder once more or, finally, the person whose house it is.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Elçin Sangu, Not a Stranger, Deha, Melis Sezen

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