Gülsim Ali

Ruse, four languages, and a modelling contest

Gülsim Ali was born on 18 February 1995 in Ruse, the Danube port city in northern Bulgaria. Her parents come from Bulgaria's Turkish minority, which makes her the rarer kind of Turkish television lead: someone who arrived in the industry from outside it, with a different first passport and a different first street. She is fluent in Turkish, Bulgarian, English and Japanese, a combination that says something about the route rather than the destination.

The first public step was not acting. In 2009, aged fourteen, she won a modelling competition in Bulgaria and went on to represent the country at an international contest in Brazil. Screen work followed from 2012, and for the next few years she accumulated the sort of credits that build a face rather than a reputation — supporting parts, period ensembles, the slow apprenticeship of Turkish serial television, where a season can run to thirty episodes and a shooting week can swallow a fortnight's worth of script.

Aslıhan Hatun, and then Dilek

The break came with Diriliş: Ertuğrul, the vast thirteenth-century historical series that became one of Turkey's biggest cultural exports of the decade. Ali played Aslıhan Hatun across the 2016 to 2018 run — a role that put her in front of an audience stretching from Anatolia to Pakistan and Indonesia, where the series found a second life in dubbing and streaming. It is still the credit that gets shouted at her in airports.

What she did with the recognition is the interesting part. Rather than stay in armour, she moved into family comedy: İlkgün in Hanım Köylü in 2016, and then, from 2020 to 2022, Dilek in Gönül Dağı — the Sivas-set rural comedy-drama that became a Saturday-night fixture on TRT 1 and ran for years at the top of its slot. Two very different muscles: the solemn, declamatory register of the historical epic, and the lighter, quicker timing of a long-running comedy where the jokes have to land on the first take because there is no second one.

Her filmography since then lists Bereketli Topraklar, Harman Yeri, Asırlık Gece and Geçmişin Kokusu — a spread across drama, web series and historical material that suggests a working actor taking the parts rather than a strategist building a brand.

The gap before the stage

By March 2025 she was talking publicly about Harman Yeri, in which she shares the leads with Berk Oktay, describing him as a generous actor with good energy and the project as one built on a strong script and strong cast. At that point the platform had not been announced and shooting was pointed at a June start. In the same conversation she said she was reading a lot of scripts and expecting offers for television, with surprises close.

The surprise, as it turned out, was not television. In February 2026 the Turkish trade press reported that Ali had accepted a stage role — her first — alongside Ümit Kantarcılar in a play called Aşk Reyonu, produced by Atlas Yapım. The announcement landed on 17 and 18 February 2026, with rehearsals already under way; by 22 February the magazine pages were describing it as a single-act comedy in which two screen performers were moving their work to a stage. Written by Çisil Oral and directed by Şenol Önder, it is a two-hander with nowhere to hide.

'I was afraid of theatre'

Ali has been unusually direct about the nerves. Speaking to reporters on 4 April 2026 at the 72nd AXA Sigorta Milliyet Athlete of the Year awards, she said she had been frightened of theatre, and that she was glad she had gone straight at the fear — she had, she said, come to love being on stage. It is a plain admission from someone with ten years of camera work behind her, and it points at the real difference: a serial actor can ask for another take, and a two-person play at eight in the evening cannot.

By 28 May 2026 the tone had settled. Asked about the run, she said it was her first time doing theatre, that her stage partner Kantarcılar was a wonderful presence who had supported her through it, that the two of them were putting on a good show together, and that she was enjoying herself — before thanking the audiences who had kept turning up. The gratitude is not boilerplate: a touring two-hander lives or dies on word of mouth between cities.

What the play is actually arguing

Aşk Reyonu — roughly, 'the love counter', as in a department-store department — starts with an accidental meeting on a shop floor. From there it sets a woman who assembles her identity out of other people's attention against a man who turns out to be very good at directing that attention. The question the production keeps returning to is whether what unfolds is a love story at all, or a transaction running smoothly to someone else's design, with status rather than affection doing the work.

Both performers have framed it as a critique rather than a romance with jokes. In an agency interview published on 27 April 2026, Kantarcılar described the piece as pressing on how consumer culture pushes women towards resembling one another — the brands, the cosmetics, the narrowing of what a face is allowed to look like. Ali, discussing the text in April 2026, said it deals with women's shopping compulsions and with imposed standards of beauty, and that she had found something personal in it. She has also noted that it reads as romantic comedy from the outside while carrying a considerably more serious message underneath, and that she hopes that message reaches women in particular.

Where things stand now

As of late October 2026 the production is a touring show rather than a resident one, moving between municipal arts centres and shopping-mall theatres across Turkey. The currently listed diary runs 17 November 2026 at the Karşıyaka Belediyesi Hikmet Şimşek Sanat Merkezi in İzmir; 18 December 2026 at the Adana 01 Burda PGM Kültür Merkezi; 13 January 2027 at Vesahne Panora and Kulis Sanat Tiyatrosu in Ankara; 15 January 2027 at the Başkent Sanat Merkezi Nata Vega, also in Ankara; and 17 February 2027 at the Yenişehir AKM Barış Salonu in Mersin. Every listed performance starts at 20:00.

Pricing reflects the room rather than the billing: tickets start around ₺438 and ₺554 for the two Ankara nights, and around ₺987 in İzmir, Adana and Mersin. Ticket-buyer ratings on the Biletinial listing sit at 4.1 out of 5 across 34 reviews — a solid rather than unanimous verdict, with a visible minority of low scores among a majority of top marks, which is about what a commercial comedy carrying a thesis tends to collect. For an actress who said she was afraid of the form eight months ago, a diary stretching into February and a tour that has already crossed most of the country is not a bad answer.