Sevinç Erbulak

Ballet shoes, then a family name

She was born Fatoş Sevinç Erbulak in Istanbul on 20 October 1975, to the actors Altan Erbulak and Füsun Erbulak. The household was a theatre household, which in Turkish stage circles is both an introduction and a debt. Her own training began some distance from the family trade: she completed the classical ballet division of the Istanbul University State Conservatory before moving to the theatre department of the Müjdat Gezen Sanat Merkezi, the acting school she later returned to as a teacher.

The screen arrived first and arrived fast. In 1993 she was cast as Zeynep in Süper Baba, a domestic comedy series that made her face familiar across the country before she had accumulated much stage work at all. The reference biographies count roughly twenty-five television and film credits after it, among them Aşk-ı Memnû in 2008 and Erkenci Kuş in 2019.

What the television work paid for was a parallel career that never left the municipal system. Erbulak joined the roster of İstanbul Şehir Tiyatroları, the city-run company, in the early 1990s, and her credited stage roles run from 1994 onwards — Soytarılar Okulu and İstanbul'un Gözleri Mahmur among the earliest.

Thirty years inside a city company

The Şehir Tiyatroları catalogue is where the substance of the career sits. She played the nurse in Tarla Kuşuydu Juliet in 2009 and returned to the same play in 2020. She was Sofie in Şark Dişçisi in 2011, a performance that took the award for best supporting actress in a musical or comedy at the 2012 Afife Theatre Awards. Katilcilik followed in 2012, Behiç Ak's Ayrılık in 2017, Zehir in 2020.

The prizes accumulated across two decades rather than in a cluster: an Avni Dilligil award in 1998, an Afife in 2003, a Lions award in 2009, the Cahide Sonku best actress award in 2011, the Afife again in 2012. For an actress working inside a repertory system, that spread reads as steady casting rather than a single breakout.

Repertory also meant a practical education in how productions are assembled. She took assistant-director credits on Sırça Hayvan Koleksiyonu in 2014 and on Hamlet in 2022, which is the conventional route into direction inside a municipal house.

Suspended by decree, then back

The most serious interruption was political rather than professional. After the coup attempt of 15 July 2016, emergency decree-laws were used to remove staff from public bodies, and Erbulak was among the Şehir Tiyatroları artists suspended. She and her colleague Mahperi Mertoğlu were subsequently reinstated, reported at the start of December 2016.

Her comment on returning was not triumphant. She described being happy and sad at once, said the country was living through days that would make Nasreddin Hodja turn in his grave, and added that hope was nonetheless intact. Earlier, while still suspended, she had said plainly that art is not work for cowards. She has stayed with the company since.

A school, two books, a rabbit

In 2014 she co-founded the Erbulak acting and writing house, a teaching operation set up with family members and colleagues, offering training in performance, writing and illustration. She continues to teach at the Müjdat Gezen centre as well. Two books carry her name: a short-story collection, Gözünü Kırpma Düşerim, published in 2002, and a novel, Artıkaranmayanlar Gezegeni, in 2018.

The directing has become concrete. On 23 February 2025 Kadife Tavşan opened at Caddebostan Kültür Merkezi, a BKM production of Margery Williams's The Velveteen Rabbit adapted and directed by Alper Kul with Erbulak as co-director. It runs sixty minutes in a single act, with Aslı Tandoğan as the rabbit and Yosi Mizrahi as the Storm — the same Mizrahi she shares a stage with on tour. Mehmet Aybars Kaya and Uzay Karaca alternate as the boy, Ali.

Where she stands now

On screen she has been Füsun in Sakla Beni for Star TV since 2023, and she has said the scenes affect her more with each episode rather than less. On stage the current work is Aşk Listesi, which premiered in 2024 and has not stopped since; the theatre listings also carry a new acting credit for her, Özel Bir Rica, dated 2026.

Aşk Listesi took the comedy production of the year award from the 25th Direklerarası audience awards for the 2024–25 season, which matters commercially in Turkey because it is voted by ticket-buyers rather than a jury, and it has driven a tour well beyond Istanbul. By the spring of 2026 the production had reached Malatya, playing the Kemal Sunal hall of the congress centre on 31 March, and Torbalı in İzmir province.

Speaking to Hürriyet in September 2025 alongside Hakan Bilgin and Yosi Mizrahi, Erbulak made the arithmetic explicit: all three of them have been working on stage for more than thirty years. She also refused the premise of the play they are touring — people fail at love because they look for perfection, she said, and perfection does not exist. She described her own marriage as being to someone like her closest friend, and said she still flirts with him.

The play itself

Aşk Listesi is Norm Foster's The Love List, translated by Eylül Aktürk and adapted and directed by Serkan Üstüner for Poetika Yapım. Oktay's fiftieth-birthday present to his friend Kenan is an instruction to write down ten qualities of his ideal woman. Melis then arrives, matching the paper exactly, and the two men spend the rest of the evening discovering what an engineered woman does to a friendship. Bilgin plays Kenan, Mizrahi plays Oktay, Erbulak plays Melis, and Serkan Kavurt designed the set. It is rated 16 and over.

The single-female-role structure could easily leave Erbulak as the device. The critic at Gazete Pencere found the opposite: she called the three-way chemistry exact, and singled out Erbulak for running the two men from inside the performance rather than being run by them. The same review called it the most entertaining production she had seen recently, and read the ending as an argument that love begins with accepting imperfection.