Hakan Bilgin

Samsun, Ordu, and a business degree that went unused

Hasan Hakan Bilgin was born on 4 April 1967 in Samsun, into a family from Arhavi in Artvin on the eastern Black Sea coast. His first stage work came with the Ordu municipal company, Karadeniz Tiyatrosu. He then read business administration at Dokuz Eylül University in İzmir and kept acting in amateur productions throughout, which is where the professional theatre eventually found him.

He never attended a conservatoire, and he is direct about what that cost him. Speaking to the student paper at Adnan Menderes University in an interview published on 13 November 2024, he called acting a profession of equipment, acknowledged the theoretical gaps that come of skipping formal training, and described reading widely and watching other actors as the way he filled them. In the same conversation he set out the hierarchy he still works by: theatre is the training ground, the place performers come from, and anyone hoping to act on film should build themselves there first.

Six years with Ortaoyuncular, then a working life between companies

The break arrived in 1990, when Ferhan Şensoy's Ortaoyuncular took him on and cast him — an amateur at the time — in Güle Güle Godot. He stayed six years with the company, whose Istanbul home was the Ses theatre, now Ses 1885, and appeared in Seyircili Seyir Defteri, Köhne Bizans Operası and Üç Kurşunluk Opera, the last of these in 1995. That apprenticeship in fast, verbally dense satirical comedy is audible in everything he has done on stage since.

After Ortaoyuncular he worked with the E.S.E.K collective assembled by Gökhan Semiz, and thereafter moved between Istanbul's independent and municipal stages rather than settling into a single ensemble: Garaj, Asmalı Sahne, Cihangir Atölye Sahnesi. His stage credits run through Biz Evrimi Çok Sevmiştik, Üçüncü Türden Yakın İlişkiler, Yaygara, Tanrım Beni Baştan Yarat and Kaygan Zemin, with Bir Yer Bir Nesne Bir Fiil in 2017 and Sevmekten Öldü Desinler in 2019. On Dönme Dolap in 2022 he was credited for the set as well as the performance.

Eşkıya, and fifty more

His first film was Yavuz Turgul's Eşkıya in 1996, still one of the defining Turkish releases of that decade; his television debut followed in Utanmaz Adam in 1998. From there the screen work became constant, and he has now passed fifty credits across film and series, among them Payitaht Abdülhamid, Arka Sokaklar and Geniş Aile.

The steadiest of these is Çakallarla Dans, the caper-comedy franchise he has appeared in since 2010 and which reached a seventh instalment in 2024. The rest of his recent slate is broad rather than deep: Veda Partisi in 2024, then C Takımı 2 and the Gaziantep-set comedy Sonradan Gurme in 2025, plus the horror picture Kamos, an unusual entry in a filmography otherwise built on comedy. He also supplied voice work for Bihter: Sonsuz Hikâye in 2025.

Bilgin has said repeatedly across interviews that the stage is where he can express himself most fully, and that cinema differs because the performance is fixed permanently while theatre exists only in the moment it is played. The touring schedule bears this out: even at his busiest on screen he has never gone a long stretch without a play running.

Aşk Listesi, the job that turned into a two-year tour

Aşk Listesi is a Turkish staging of The Love List by Norm Foster, the Canadian playwright whose work is performed more often than any other in his country. Eylül Aktürk translated it, Serkan Üstüner adapted and directed, Serkan Kavurt designed the set, and Poetika Yapım produced. It premiered on 14 November 2024 with Bilgin alongside Sevinç Erbulak and Yosi Mizrahi, and it has been on the road more or less continuously since.

The premise is a mechanism rather than a plot. Kenan, a statistician, turns fifty. His friend Oktay, a writer, gives him a list said to have come from a fortune teller: write down the ten qualities that would make you happy, ranked, and she will appear. Melis then walks in, matching the specification, and the comedy proceeds from the gap between the specification and the person.

The production won Comedy Production of the Year at the 25th Direklerarası Audience Awards for the 2024–25 season, which is what has kept it viable as a touring title into a second and third season. Interviewed together by Hürriyet on 20 September 2025, the three leads treated the play's argument as settled: Erbulak said perfect people do not exist and that this is fine, and Bilgin said the show demonstrates that perfection does not exist and the search for it is not right. He described being in love as a temporary, passion-filled state that clouds judgement. The three counted seven marriages between them and joked that this made them a relationship-guru outfit.

Autumn 2026: nineteen dates and a film landing mid-tour

The summer was spent outdoors. Aşk Listesi reopened the renovated DİGEM Sanat Akademisi stage in Didim on 8 July 2026, where local press reported a full house and sustained applause and Bilgin told the audience he had grown fond of the town and would soon be a Didim local. The open-air run continued to the Ayfer Feray theatre in İzmir on 25 August 2026 and the Selamiçeşme Özgürlük Park amphitheatre in Kadıköy on 27 August.

The indoor season now on sale carries the production through to the end of the year across roughly nineteen dates. It opens at the Watergarden performance centre in Ataşehir on 30 September, then plays Kadıköy Eğitim Sahnesi on 6 October, Beylikdüzü Atatürk Kültür ve Sanat Merkezi on 7 October, Bolu on 15 October, Manavgat on 22 October, the Türkan Şoray centre in Antalya on 23 October and Caddebostan Kültür Merkezi on 24 October. November takes in Sakarya TED Sahne on the 6th, Salihli on the 9th, Bostanlı Suat Taşer in İzmir on the 10th, Edremit on the 11th, Çankaya Belediyesi Atatürk Sanat Merkezi in Ankara on the 23rd and the Orhangazi hall at Bursa's Merinos centre on the 27th, with Muğla dates scattered between 21 October and 17 December and a closing night at the Kapadokya Kültür Merkezi in Nevşehir on 20 December. Seats start at ₺1,000, rising to around ₺1,445 at the larger halls.

Halfway through that run the screen work reappears. Çakallarla Dans 8: Şututgart Çıkarması, directed by Murat Şeker and shot in Istanbul and Germany for SugarWorkz, TAFF Pictures and CJ ENM Türkiye, opens in Turkish cinemas on 6 November 2026, with the crew abducted into a people-smuggling network on the road to Germany. The first trailer is out.

The other job

Since 2002 Bilgin has worked with TOÇEV, the Turkish children's education foundation, joining its board in 2016. He has hosted the First Lego League tournaments in Turkey since 2004 and co-founded the Science Heroes Association that runs them, and has given more than a hundred school seminars reaching upwards of forty thousand secondary students, along with TEDx talks. In 2017 he fronted the television quiz Herkes Kazanır. He is married to Çiğdem Bilgin; they have a child, Derin.