Onur Saylak, the prime-time heavy behind Turkey’s most unsettling dramas

Onur Saylak

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	May 12, 1977 Ankara, Turkey
Occupation	Actor and director
Known for	Autumn
Awards	Yeşilçam · SİYAD · Yılmaz Güney Award, Adana Film Festival · FIPRESCI Prize, Valladolid International Film Festival · Best Director, Dhaka International Film Festival · Best Film, East End Film Festival

Turkish viewers who know Onur Saylak from evening television carry a fairly fixed picture of him: the man in the good suit who sends someone else to do the work. In Gaddar he was the boss everyone called Müdür, the one who keeps Çağatay Ulusoy’s hitman on a leash. The credits behind the camera tell another story. Saylak directed Şahsiyet, the series in which Haluk Bilginer’s forgetful retired court clerk starts to kill, and Daha, a film about a boy pressed into his father’s people-smuggling trade. Both came out of his partnership with the novelist Hakan Günday, and both make the viewer sit in a room with people they would rather not understand.

The two careers are less separate than they look. Much of the work runs through one production house, Kerem Çatay’s Ay Yapım, which made the prime-time series he acts in and the series he directs, and which is behind his next job as well: Eve Giden Yol, a thriller for Netflix. What makes that job worth watching is a line in the credits. It will be the first feature or series he has directed that Günday did not write.

He reached acting by elimination. Saylak, whose full name is Arif Onur Saylak, was born in Ankara on 12 May 1977 and began a physics degree at Middle East Technical University before leaving it for public administration at Ankara University. There the faculty theatre club gave him his first parts, and a run of amateur productions settled the question. He applied to the theatre department of Bilkent University and got in. While still a student he appeared with the Ankara State Theatre in Joshua Sobol’s Ghetto and Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, sang in the university choir and, in 2003, presented a youth programme, Hadi Gidelim, on TRT 2.

Television found him in the middle of that decade, first in Hisarbuselik and Kod Adı, then as Ziya in Asi and as Levent in Gönülçelen, where his co-star was Tuba Büyüküstün. Cinema came through Özcan Alper’s Sonbahar. Saylak played Yusuf, a man released after ten years in prison and a hunger strike, who goes home to the eastern Black Sea for what turn out to be his last two months. It is a quiet, withheld performance, and it earned him best actor at the Yeşilçam Awards and from the Turkish Film Critics Association. He worked with Alper again in Rüzgarın Hatıraları, as Aram.

In 2015 he set up his own company, b.i.t arts, and directed a short film, Orman, with Büyüküstün in the cast. Two years later came Daha, adapted from Günday’s novel and written by Saylak, Günday and Doğu Yaşar Akal. Its centre is Gaza, a fourteen-year-old on the Aegean coast whose father, played by Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan, puts him to work in the side business of moving refugees from the Middle East. The film opened in competition at Karlovy Vary in July 2017, then took the Yılmaz Güney Award at the Adana Film Festival, the FIPRESCI critics’ prize at Valladolid, best director and best screenplay in Dhaka and best film at London’s East End Film Festival. At Karlovy Vary he told reporters the film had been easy to shoot because it was real.

Şahsiyet followed in March 2018 on the streaming service puhutv. Günday wrote it, Ay Yapım produced it, and Saylak directed the story of Agâh Beyoğlu, a retired court clerk who receives an Alzheimer’s diagnosis and decides to spend the memory he has left settling old cases. Bilginer won the International Emmy for best actor for the role in 2019, and Saylak came back to direct a second season, released on GAİN from November 2023. In between, the partnership moved to Netflix: the comedy-drama Wild Abandon (Uysallar) in 2022, then in 2023 Chokehold (Boğa Boğa), in which Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ and Funda Eryiğit play a couple who flee a financial scandal in Istanbul for a small Aegean town that makes clear it does not want them.

The Günday pairing is the strength of Saylak’s directing, and also its open question. Every long-form project he has made began on the novelist’s page, and Günday’s subject sets the terms: complicity, and the violence a family or a village agrees not to see. Saylak’s contribution is control. He holds a scene longer than Turkish television usually allows and lets faces carry what the dialogue refuses to say. The weak point has been the landing. MCM’s review of Chokehold found a taut thriller that loses its nerve in its final stretch, a pattern that makes the change of writer on his next series more than a footnote.

The acting has never stopped, and it keeps him at the centre of mainstream Turkish drama. He played Tevfik, known as Yanık Efe, in the period series Vatanım Sensin, and Veli Cevher opposite Tatlıtuğ in Ay Yapım’s Çarpışma, before the boss in Gaddar on NOW in 2024. In Deha, which ran on Show TV from September 2024 to May 2025, he played Ali Haydar; the series won the International Emmy for best telenovela in November 2025. In February 2025 he also joined the cast of Yankı: Görünmez El on TRT’s tabii platform, as Metin, the older brother of Cihangir Ceyhan’s banker. Between screen jobs he has gone back to the stage, as Stanley Kowalski in Hira Tekindor’s 2017 production of A Streetcar Named Desire and as Pierre in Florian Zeller’s The Son in 2019, and he has taught film and drama at Istanbul’s Kadir Has University.

His private life has been public mostly through his first marriage. Saylak married Büyüküstün in Paris in July 2011; their twin daughters, Maya and Toprak, were born in January 2012, and the couple divorced in June 2017, four weeks before Daha, in which she plays a leading role, had its premiere. In 2020 he married the manager Gözde Yılmaz, and their son, Deniz Ali, was born that December.

The next test is already shooting. Eve Giden Yol is an eight-episode Ay Yapım series for Netflix, written by Sevgi Yılmaz and led by Aras Bulut İynemli, his co-star from Deha. It begins with a traffic accident and strands a group of strangers in a remote Anatolian village, around Kemal, a man trying to put a broken life back together. Filming officially began in July 2026, and Netflix has not yet announced a release date. When it arrives, it will answer the question his directing has carried since Daha: whether the unease belonged to Günday’s pages or to the man holding the camera.