Onur Buldu

Bergama, then the state theatre

Onur Buldu was born on 4 August 1982 in Bergama, the ancient Pergamon, in the hills north of İzmir. He studied performing arts at Dokuz Eylül University's Faculty of Fine Arts and was already working with the İzmir State Theatre while still a student, which is an unusually early entry into the salaried end of Turkish theatre. He moved to Istanbul after finishing his training, the standard route for anyone in Turkey who wants screen work as well as a stage.

The Bergama connection has stayed useful to him rather than decorative. When he took the lead in the adventure film Efes'in Sırrı, released on 16 January 2026, he made a point of the fact that the production shot in a part of the country whose classical history he grew up inside, and argued that a children's adventure built around the ruins could do something for historical awareness rather than simply borrow a backdrop.

Nine years as Bilal Koçyiğit

Buldu's public face in Turkey is Bilal Koçyiğit, the character he played on Show TV's Güldür Güldür Show from 2013 until 2022. Güldür Güldür is a weekly sketch programme with an ensemble cast and an enormous television and YouTube audience, and a recurring character on it becomes a household reference in a way that few television roles anywhere manage. He left the cast in 2022 and returned in 2024, and the return was treated as news in its own right.

That kind of run has a cost, and Buldu has been plain about it. Sketch comedy trains an actor to land a premise in ninety seconds and to be recognisable in the first three. It does not train him for much else, and he has said openly that working only in comedy narrows what an actor can do and that he wants dramatic parts in order to keep developing. The stage work he is doing now reads as one answer to that problem, and the film work as another.

The film that changed the register

Before Güldür Güldür he was already on screen in Organize İşler in 2005, and he kept a steady comic film career going through titles such as Dedemin Fişi in 2016. The break in register came with Dört Duvar in 2021, a drama that took him to the 34th Tokyo International Film Festival, where the best actor prize went jointly to him and three of his co-stars. Shared ensemble awards are sometimes read as a hedge by a jury; in this case it was the point, since the film is built on four men in confinement rather than on a single lead.

He followed it with Paranoya in 2024 and then with Efes'in Sırrı in January 2026, a fantasy adventure aimed at younger audiences in which he carried the lead. Talking about that release, he tied it to the state of Turkish cinema exhibition, arguing that good domestic productions are what bring audiences back into cinemas. Taken together, the last five years have moved him from sketch player to someone who can be cast in a festival drama and in a family-film lead in the same stretch of career.

Kirli Sepeti: the dirty-laundry basket

Kirli Sepeti is the work Buldu is touring now, made with Uğur Bilgin and Aziz Aslan and produced by YSM Yapım. The three of them decline to call it a play. In a long conversation published on 1 March 2026 they described it as a gösteri, a show, and said they had deliberately avoided the word theatre so that nobody arrives expecting a text-based drama. What it actually is: three actors telling true stories from their own lives, the stupidest and most exposing ones, and then dropping into short enacted scenes that play those memories out.

It is not improvisation, whatever the loose format suggests. They wrote their own stories down first, then built a script around them to handle the transitions and to give the evening an argument rather than a running order. The piece has been rebuilt repeatedly in front of paying audiences. It opened at around two hours and twenty minutes with interactive sections, and was cut down over many performances on the basis of what worked; Aslan's description is that Kirli Sepeti rehearsed with its audiences. What survives ends on a fairly direct note: three men who came from ordinary places and made careers out of it, arguing that if they managed it, so can the people watching.

The same interview shows Buldu's wariness about the ground he is standing on. He argued that the space for comedy in Turkey has narrowed sharply, that a professional can now lose a career over a single line taken badly, and he contrasted that with the freedom comedians of Levent Kırca's generation had. A show made of his own unflattering memories is, among other things, material that belongs to him and cannot be re-litigated as someone else's joke.

Where things stand, September 2026

The show has been on the road for well over a year. It was playing İzmir's Bostanlı Suat Taşer hall in April 2025, filled the Özer Olgun Kültür Merkezi in Fethiye on 14 March 2026 to a standing ovation, and played the Çankaya Municipality Atatürk Kültür Merkezi in Ankara on 6 September 2026. On the Biletinial listing it carries a 4.4 out of 5 average from 534 ratings, which for a touring comedy is a strong and unusually well-populated score.

Eight dates are currently on sale, all at 20:30. İzmir takes the first two, at the Bostanlı Suat Taşer hall on 2 October and İstinyeArt %100 Performans Arena on 3 October, followed by the Ünal Baysan Kültür Merkezi in Çorlu on 4 October. Istanbul gets three: DasDas on 11 October, Üsküdar's Bağlarbaşı Kültür Merkezi on 17 October and Beylikdüzü's Atatürk Kültür ve Sanat Merkezi on 18 October. The run then jumps to December, with the Merinos AKKM Orhangazi hall in Bursa on 6 December and the Vehbi Koç Kongre Merkezi in Eskişehir on 11 December. Tickets run from 850 to 1,250 lira depending on the venue.

The pattern of the booking says something about the work. These are municipal culture centres and mid-sized halls in provincial cities as much as Istanbul rooms, and the dates are spaced out rather than stacked into a season at a single address. It is a touring show built to be portable, which fits a cast whose day jobs are television and film and who have kept this thing running in the gaps.