Altan Erkekli

A stand-in part in Ankara

Reşit Altan Erkekli was born in Istanbul on 18 January 1955, into a family from the village of Erkekli in Yozgat — the surname and the place are the same word, which tells its own story about where the household came from. He went through secondary school at Kadıköy Maarif Koleji and was heading towards engineering. An English teacher pushed him elsewhere, and in 1975 he entered the theatre department of Ankara University's Faculty of Language, History and Geography.

The professional career started by accident. Still a student, Erkekli went on in the lead of a production called Kopernikli Yüzbaşı when the cast actor failed to appear for the opening. Rutkay Aziz saw it and brought him into Ankara Sanat Tiyatroları, the company that defined political theatre in the capital. He stayed, taught at the university alongside the work, and spent the rest of the 1970s and early 1980s in a repertory system rather than in front of a camera — which is the part of his biography most of the screen audience never sees. His first best-actor prize is dated 1982, seven years after he enrolled.

Children's theatre, Mefisto, and twenty years of repertory

Between 1985 and 1989 Erkekli worked in the children's and youth division of the State Theatres, a posting that tends to be treated as a sideline and rarely is: it is where actors learn to hold a room that will not pretend to be interested. He went back to Ankara Sanat afterwards.

The stage credits through the 1990s read as a straight run of serious repertory work: Yusuf ile Menofis in 1989, Mefisto in 1990 — he played Hendrik Höfgen, the actor who sells himself to the regime — Salpa in 1991, Yolcu in 1992 and Sakıncalı Piyade in 1993. Two productions opened in 1999, Akrep and Sen Hiç Ateş Böceği Gördün mü?, followed by İnadına Yaşamak in 2001.

In 2003 the comic register paid off. Erkekli took the Afife Theatre Award for the year's best actor in a musical or comedy, which sits oddly beside Höfgen and sits perfectly beside what he does now. He had already taken a second best-actor prize in 1996. For a generation of Turkish theatregoers he was also a voice before he was a face: he dubbed Edi in the Turkish Sesame Street.

Vizontele, and what the cinema did to the stage actor

The break came in 2001 with Vizontele, Yılmaz Erdoğan's film about television arriving in a south-eastern town in 1974. Erkekli played Nazmi Doğan and won the Golden Orange for best actor that year. After twenty-five years of repertory, the recognition arrived through a cinema release, and the work changed shape around it — he moved into the Beşiktaş Kültür Merkezi orbit, the company behind Vizontele, and the screen credits accumulated: Organize İşler in 2005, Istanbul Tales the same year, Ayla in 2017, and television more or less continuously from 1994 onwards.

Two other commitments run underneath all of it. Since 2007 he has taught diction, presenting, voice work and performance at the Başkent Communication Sciences Academy. And in 2009 he was elected to Beşiktaş municipal council on the Republican People's Party list — not a symbolic appointment but a four-year seat on a local authority, taken at the point where most actors of his standing were consolidating a screen career.

Two men, an orchestra, and the oldest form in the repertoire

The work that now occupies most of Erkekli's stage calendar is a partnership with the actor and musician Veysel Diker, and it has produced two shows that keep running years after they opened.

Şifa Niyetine arrived in 2017 and received Ministry of Culture support for private theatres in the 2017–18 season. It is a two-act piece, listed at 120 minutes, scored for an ensemble of piano, double bass, guitar, cello and percussion. Erkekli narrates episodes from his own life, Turkish theatre history and the relationship between the republic and the arts; Diker sings Anatolian folk songs arranged on western foundations. The songs were released as an album, and Diker was nominated at the 2019 Golden Butterfly music awards for them. Audience scoring on the main ticketing platform sits at 4.8 out of 5 across 101 verified ratings, 83 of them full marks.

Ortadaki Oyun followed in 2023, written and directed by Diker, with music by Özge Metin. The title puns on orta oyunu — the improvised Ottoman comic form played in the round, with a fixed pair of opposed characters and no fourth wall — and the production takes that structure as its frame for musical satire about present-day life. Erkekli had already approached the same tradition from another angle in 2017, playing a meddah, the solo storyteller, in Direklerarası, named after the Istanbul quarter where the old companies performed. Three decades after Mefisto, he is working in the form that predates the proscenium entirely.

Autumn 2026: a lead for Ceylan, a landlord in December

The most consequential thing in Erkekli's year is a film nobody has seen yet. He plays Sabri, the lead, in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Yorgun Güneş, opposite Pınar Deniz as his daughter Defne. Sabri lives alone in Ankara and is invited to Defne's summer house on the coast; the film is built on the confrontation that follows. Shooting began in Istanbul in early June 2026, moved to Assos in Çanakkale, and was reported complete on 27 July 2026. Osman Sonant plays Defne's husband, with Kerem Bürsin, Mahir İpek, Serkan Ercan and Şebnem Hassanisoughi in support. No release date has been announced. For an actor of seventy-one whose screen reputation rests largely on comedy, a Ceylan lead is a different order of thing.

The theatre commitment for the winter was announced on 29 September 2026. Erkekli joins Hülya Avşar in Kanlı Nigar Müzikali, adapted from Sadık Şendil's play, with Avşar as Nigar and Erkekli as Agâh Efendi, her landlord. Fatih Dokgöz directs for the producer Onurcan Taş of ODD Entertainment, and the production promises a live orchestra, built sets and a large dance company. Read-throughs were set for the second week of October 2026, with the opening in December — a schedule that leaves roughly eight weeks between first reading and curtain on a full musical.

The sector recognition came earlier. On 22 November 2024, at the opening of the 27th International Ankara Theatre Festival at CerModern, Erkekli was given the festival's honorary award by the mayor Hüseyin Can Güner. He used the speech to thank the city's teachers — "you taught me that life must be lived like theatre, that theatre can transform life" — and then to lobby from the podium for the historic Ankara Art Theatre building to be returned to its original use. The festival, run by Çankaya Municipality with TAKSAV, carried 42 productions from Serbia, Iran, Azerbaijan and across Turkey until 2 December 2024.

Where the work actually happens

The touring map is worth reading, because it is not the map of a career winding down. Ortadaki Oyun's home is the Kadıköy Eğitim Sahnesi in Istanbul, but the dates on sale run through Yenimahalle in Ankara, the Akif Gülle Kültür Merkezi in Merzifon, the Çorum state theatre and a culture centre in Elazığ — municipal halls in towns that get one touring production a month, not the subsidised metropolitan houses. Earlier in 2026 the same show played Torbalı's municipal culture centre outside İzmir on 26 February.

That is the economy the piece is built for: two performers, a set of songs, a form that was designed to be carried from town to town before anyone built a theatre to put it in. Fifty-one years after the stand-in part in Ankara, Erkekli is still working the provinces between a Ceylan shoot and a musical.