Ceyhun Fersoy

A childhood in transit, then Beşiktaş

Ceyhun Fersoy was born in Istanbul on 10 April 1982. His father's work took the family abroad for part of his childhood, so his schooling was split across Switzerland, France and Turkey before he finished at Istanbul's Burak Bora Anadolu Lisesi. The acting training came in two separate blocks rather than one conservatoire run: the TÜRVAK cinema and television centre in 2000–01, then the Müjdat Gezen Sanat Merkezi in 2005–06. The second of those matters more than it looks on a CV, because the man whose school he attended is the man who now writes and directs the show he spends his 2026 evenings in.

His professional start was at Beşiktaş Kültür Merkezi, the comedy factory that supplied a generation of Turkish screen comics, and the television work followed from there: Bir Demet Tiyatro, Kurtlar Vadisi, İki Aile and Çocuklar Duymasın. The part that made the name recognisable in a ticket listing was Şahin Balcı in Seksenler, the long-running period sitcom. It also supplied his private life — he met the actor Begüm Öner on that set and married her in 2015.

The repertoire he actually built

The screen credits are the famous part; the stage credits are the steadier part. From the middle of the last decade Fersoy worked almost continuously in Istanbul's commercial comedy sector: Tuhaf Bir Pazar Günü in 2016, then Kaç Baba Kaç in 2017, where he played Ted, and Bir Tuhaf Dünya the same year. In 2018 he was in both Eski Zaman Hikayesi and SUİT – Düğün Dündü Bugün Bugün. These are touring comedies rather than subsidised repertory, which is the relevant detail for understanding what happened to him in 2022: the model depends on getting a van full of actors to a provincial culture centre, playing, and driving to the next one.

The 2021 production Baş Belası was the turn that earned him something beyond bookings. He played Hulusi — the character he had already carried on television in Bir Demet Tiyatro — and took the best male actor prize in the comedy and musical category at the Yeni Tiyatro Dergisi labour and achievement awards for it.

Since 2023 he has also been on the other side of the ledger. Pembe Pırlantalar, the Michael Pertwee farce translated by Gencay Gürün and directed by Serkan Üstüner, lists Fersoy as both performer and producer, alongside Sinan Çalışkanoğlu, Lemi Filozof, Sena Kaya and Billur Yazgan. It runs two acts and 120 minutes, is rated 12 and up, and has accumulated 4.6 out of 5 from 1,655 Biletinial raters, 1,306 of whom gave it five stars — a strong score for a two-partners-in-a-jeweller's-shop farce. Its Biletinial page currently shows no dates on sale, the production having been parked while its lead is occupied elsewhere.

Merzifon, November 2022

On the night of 21 November 2022 the minibus carrying the Baş Belası company ran into the back of a lorry at Merzifon, in Amasya province. The troupe had played Çorum and was travelling on to Samsun. The driver was speeding. Three people in the vehicle were killed at the scene: Tolga Güleryüz, 33, Burak Topçu, 42, and Özgür Karataş, 32. Eight were injured, among them Fersoy and his fellow performers Sergen Deveci and Melis İşiten.

The Amasya governor, Mustafa Masatlı, went to the hospital and told reporters that Fersoy's condition was good, with a tendon problem in the foot and minor injuries elsewhere, and that he expected a discharge within days. Fersoy was treated at the Amasya Sabuncuoğlu Şerafettin hospital and released. He later described the damage more fully to followers asking after him: surgery on the ankle, fractures, a torn ligament.

On 25 November 2022 he posted the only statement about it that has stuck. Closing his eyes, he wrote, he was back inside the moment; opening them, he thought it could not have been real. He said he could not describe the grief of losing companions of the road. Anyone pricing a touring comedy ticket in Turkey since then has been pricing a business that lost three of its people on a trunk road between two bookings.

2026: a baby, a musical, and a row about sightlines

Two things happened to Fersoy in the first half of 2026. On 26 February, Begüm Öner gave birth to their first child, a daughter named Karya. And on 15 April, at the Ülker Spor ve Etkinlik Salonu, he opened in Gırgıriye Müzikali as Bayram.

The production is Müjdat Gezen's — he wrote it, directs it, and plays Emin in it. It takes the Gırgıriye neighbourhood comedies of the early 1980s and rebuilds them as a full stage musical, with Roma music, a live orchestra and choreography credited to Mustafa Erdoğan and Anadolu Ateşi. Ali Erenus is music director, Kaan Eman designed the lighting, Gülşah Saraçoğlu and Fatma Bayraktar the costumes; Onurcan Taş and Mehmet Uslu produce. The cast runs past twenty names and is deliberately loaded: Perran Kutman as Sabahat, returning to performance after twelve years away and reunited with Gezen for the first time in forty-six years since Artiz Mektebi, Gülben Ergen as Güllü, plus Suzan Kardeş, Selçuk Ural, Semiha Yankı, Ömür Göksel, Günay Karacaoğlu and the journalist Uğur Dündar. Speaking to the press on 12 April, Kutman was blunt about why she had stayed off television: the production schedules, she said, now make the work difficult to do properly.

The scale brought its own problem. On 21 April the show moved into the İstanbul Kongre Merkezi Harbiye Oditoryumu, and the following evening an audience member's objection to the view from their seat turned into a confrontation in the auditorium. Gezen, then 83 years into a career that began before most of the cast was born, became unwell during it and that night's performance was cancelled. He came back the next day, after treatment, and worked through the seats one by one checking what could and could not be seen from each. His verdict, delivered from the floor, was that the stage was invisible from some of them: visible from here, not from there.

Where it stands now

Gırgıriye has held, and the autumn schedule is the evidence. Three Istanbul dates are on sale through October 2026, and the venue choices show a production that has outgrown a conventional theatre: Zorlu PSM's Turkcell Sahnesi on 12 October at 21:00, from ₺1,350; the Ataköy Marina open-air stage on 14 October at 20:00, from ₺1,980; and Paribu Vadi open-air on 17 October at 20:00, from ₺1,850. These are arena and open-air prices, not comedy-circuit prices.

Audience scoring sits at 4.4 out of 5 from 802 Biletinial raters, lower than Fersoy's own Pembe Pırlantalar but across a much bigger and more sceptical room. The persistent complaint, repeated across viewer forums, is the running time — the listing puts it at 180 minutes and some who have sat through it report closer to three and a half hours — along with a suspicion that the size of the cast is doing commercial work as well as dramatic work. The counter-argument in the same threads is Kutman and Gezen themselves: two performers in their eighties running a room of that size on timing and improvised exchange rather than on amplification.

For Fersoy the position is unusual for a jobbing comic actor of 44. He is the generational bridge in a cast assembled around nostalgia, playing opposite the man who taught him, in the highest-grossing Turkish stage production currently touring, while his own farce waits for dates.