Mehmet Bülent İnal

Şanlıurfa, and a literature degree he walked away from

He was born Mehmet Bülent İnal on 19 May 1973 in Şanlıurfa, and grew up moving between cities as his father's administrative postings shifted. Turkish biographical write-ups describe a mixed background — Arab and Zaza on his father's side, Seljuk-descended on his mother's — which is the kind of detail that follows a south-eastern actor around in the Turkish press whether or not it has anything to do with the work.

The route into acting was not direct. He enrolled at Ege University to read Turkish language and literature, abandoned it after a year, then sat the entrance exams again and got into the theatre department of Dokuz Eylül University's fine arts faculty in İzmir, where he took his degree in acting. Conservatoire training in İzmir in the mid-1990s meant a diet of repertoire rather than screen technique, and the first credit that shows up on his stage record is Brecht — the Turkish staging of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, listed at 1999.

Screen work started almost immediately afterwards. His first television credit is given as Dikkat Bebek Var in 2000, followed by Azad in 2002, Kurşun Yarası in 2003, a part in Yılmaz Erdoğan's film Vizontele Tuuba the same year, and then Ihlamurlar Altında in 2005, the melodrama that first made him a name recognisable outside İzmir. A run of comedy followed: the Akşamdan Kalma films of 2008, 2010 and 2012, in which he played Emin across all three.

Five seasons as Abdul Hamid II

The role that fixed his public image arrived in 2017. Payitaht: Abdülhamid cast him as the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II and ran for five seasons until 2021 — a long stretch of state-broadcaster historical drama, with the political weather that comes attached to it in Turkey. In 2018 he was named best male actor at the Medya Oscarları, the prizes given by the radio and television journalists' association, with the award handed over by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

He stayed in that register afterwards rather than running from it: the title role in Mevlânâ Celâleddîn-i Rûmî across 2023 and 2024 put him in another robed, reverent, slow-moving production. By then the shape of his career was legible — a tall, grave screen presence, mostly deployed in costume, mostly carrying the weight of a series on his own.

Which is what makes the stage work interesting. The one stage credit between Brecht in 1999 and the present is Köprüden Görünüş in 2015, Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, in which he played Eddie — a part with no grandeur in it at all, a dock worker undone by something he will not name.

The two-hander: Evlilikte Ufak Tefek Cinayetler

On 17 March 2025, at 8.30pm, İnal opened a new production at Fişekhane in Istanbul: Evlilikte Ufak Tefek Cinayetler, the Turkish staging of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's two-character play about a married couple, translated by Şehsuvar Aktaş and directed by Ersin Umut Güler for Aysa Prodüksiyon Tiyatrosu. His partner on stage, and the only other person in it, is Dolunay Soysert. The design team is credited as Cihan Aşar on set, Özlem Kaya on costume, Yasin Gültepe on lighting, with Sinan Akcan as dramaturg.

The play runs 80 minutes in a single act and is rated 12 and over. The production describes it as a couple's reckoning with their own past — secrets, lies and what the publicity calls dangerous games — staged, by its own account, closer to abstraction and contemporary art practice than to drawing-room naturalism: the marriage treated as a ritual and a labyrinth rather than a sitting room with a sideboard. In practice that means two performers, very little furniture, and nowhere for either of them to hide for an hour and twenty minutes.

The opening week set the pattern the production has kept since: one date at a time, moving between houses rather than sitting in one. After the Fişekhane premiere came Caddebostan Kültür Merkezi on 21 March 2025, Fişekhane again on 23 March, and Zorlu PSM on 26 March.

October 2026: a phone in the dark

Through 2026 the show has worked as a touring two-hander, playing Istanbul on both sides of the Bosphorus and taking single dates in other cities — the Atatürk Sanat Merkezi in Çankaya, Ankara, on 9 March 2026 at 8pm; Antalya on 16 and 17 October; Mersin on 25 November and Gaziantep on 26 November, according to the production's own date listings.

Then, on 19 October 2026, Sözcü reported that images shot inside the auditorium during a performance had spread on social media, and the argument that followed had less to do with the play than with what the audience had seen of it. The disputed material is nudity. Coverage the next day in Cumhuriyet described a readership split cleanly in two: one camp treating undress as an ordinary tool of stage storytelling and nobody's business, the other questioning the choice itself — the sharpest version of the objection, quoted in both papers, being a flat refusal of the premise that nudity on its own constitutes boldness.

The reports that carried the story do not include any response from the two performers or from Aysa Prodüksiyon, and the production's listings have not changed in consequence: the dates advertised before the row are the dates still being sold. What the episode did do was put a mid-sized touring play on the national news pages, and send a certain amount of curiosity towards the box office.

Where he stands now

On screen, 2026 has been a year of exits and signings. He joined NOW's Kıskanmak as the prosecutor Cihan Güneş, appearing from episode 12 to episode 33, and the series was pulled on ratings grounds, ending with that 33rd episode on 19 May 2026. Before the finale had even aired, Sözcü reported on 11 May 2026 that he had agreed terms on a new series, Ömür Usta, sharing the lead with Nurgül Yeşilçay and Gonca Vuslateri, with Enes Koçak and Cemre Arda cast as the title character's children.

That leaves the theatre as the thing actually on sale under his name. The current booking window opens at Kadıköy Eğitim Sahnesi on 6 November 2026 and runs through to the middle of December, a single date roughly every week or ten days, scattered across municipal halls and commercial houses on both sides of the city. For an actor whose television work has mostly involved a costume department and a crowd, it is a deliberately exposed way to spend a winter.