Volkan Aktan

Maltepe, Pera, and a 2005 diploma

Volkan Aktan was born in 1980 in Istanbul and gives Maltepe, on the Anatolian side, as his home district. He trained in the theatre department of Pera Güzel Sanatlar, graduating from the school in 2005, and went on to work as an actor with Tiyatro Pera, the company attached to it. That is an unusually short distance between training and employment, and it shaped the shape of his twenties: a conservatory education that led straight into a repertory payroll rather than into the audition circuit.

Turkish theatre reference listings credit him with stage work from 2003, two years before he finished the course, which fits the way private companies in Istanbul tend to operate — students carry spears, understudy and fill out crowd scenes long before they graduate. He is represented commercially by Burak Şimşek Menajerlik.

Working through the repertoire

The stage record that follows is a conventional company actor's climb. He appeared in Yanlışlıklar Komedisi in 2005, played Launcelot in Venedik Taciri in 2008, and turned up as a villager in Vanya Dayı in 2010 — Shakespeare and Chekhov taken on as house productions rather than as prestige revivals. Kısasa Kısas followed in 2014, then a named part, Turgay, in Ben Senim in 2015, and Aşk ve Para in 2016.

Alongside those he worked the rest of a private company's output: children's shows including Aman Aman and Sihirli Kitap, a Brecht cabaret staged as Rahat Yaşamaya Övgü, and the musical Akdeniz. The venues in his listings map the geography of commercial Istanbul theatre over that period — Grand Pera Emek, Asmalı Sahne, Garaj, Tatavla Sahne — mid-sized rooms that live or die on word of mouth rather than on subsidy.

What the record does not show is a breakout. There is no single production that lifted him out of the ensemble, and his profile pages carry no awards. The change, when it came, was not a role but a run.

The play that would not close

Ölü'n Bizi Ayırana Dek is a comedy about a couple, Cansu and Serdar, who have decided to divorce, throw a party to mark it, and wake the next morning in the same bed with almost no memory of the night and a dead body on the sitting-room sofa. Working out who killed him becomes the machinery for taking the marriage apart in public. The concept is credited to the writer and broadcaster PUCCA; the script is by Murat Dişli, Alper Atalan, Zeki Enes Akkan and Ebru Cündübeyoğlu. Hakan Yılmaz directs and plays Serdar, Cündübeyoğlu plays Cansu, and Aktan is the third performer on stage. It is produced by Bult Yapım and Oyun Adamı, with Cengiz Şahin as producer.

Theatre listings date the production to 2017, and it has never really stopped. Covering the show's night at the Paraf Kuruçeşme open-air stage on the Bosphorus, Milliyet reported on 28 July 2023 that the play had been selling out across Turkey for four years and that the evening marked the leads' 600th performance. It was the first piece of theatre the Kuruçeşme venue had staged at all. The actor Dolunay Soysert, in the audience, singled out the chemistry between the two leads; the report describes a crowd laughing loudly at the water's edge.

A run at that length is the thing worth noticing in Aktan's career. Turkish commercial comedies rarely tour for the better part of a decade, and doing so requires the third part to hold up night after night in rooms of wildly different size, from municipal culture centres to open-air amphitheatres.

Screen work in the gaps

Television and film have run in parallel, mostly in supporting parts. His earliest credits are the series Yedi Numara in 2000 and Beşik Kertmesi in 2002, followed by the feature Hacivat Karagöz Neden Öldürüldü? in 2005. He played Kubilay, a henchman figure, in the Fox series Baraj, and a doctor named Kaan in the 2020 film Bir Yalnızlık Şarkısı. In 2022 he appeared in Yakamoz S-245, the Turkish-language submarine series made for Netflix and the credit that travels furthest outside Turkey.

More recent work has been steady rather than prominent: the 2024 film Tur Rehberi and the historical picture Bir Cumhuriyet Şarkısı, and in 2025 a vertical-format series, Tatlı Bir Aşk — the short, phone-shaped drama form that Turkish producers moved into hard in the mid-2020s.

2026: the other side of the table

The most substantial recent development is a change of job. Aktan now shares the director's credit on Bundan Daha İyi Nasıl Olur?, a romantic comedy he co-directs with Büşra Bulut from a script by Onur Ümit and F. Erşan Özhim, with Hakan Yılmaz as general artistic director. The premise is a speed-dating night: Seda, in her mid-thirties and out of ideas about love, drags her oldest school friend Semih along, and the parade of unsuitable candidates that follows pushes the two of them into territory neither wants to revisit. It runs 80 minutes in a single act, rated 13 and over, and is played by Ayça Koptur, Burak Topaloğlu and Kürşat Demir, with set and costume by Aygül İleri and lighting by Umut Külen.

The production is touring nationally through Biletix. A representative date has it at the Ege University Atatürk Cultural Centre, Yunus Emre Hall, in İzmir on 3 April 2026 at 20.30, at ₺750 a seat. On biletinial it carries a 4.8 out of 5 rating, though from only 25 ratings — a young show rather than a proven one.

Ölü'n Bizi Ayırana Dek, meanwhile, continues with him in it. Listings place the play at the Paribu Vadi open-air theatre in Istanbul on 6 October 2026 at 21.00, with set design by Emine Dokuz and sound and lighting again by Umut Külen. The through-line in both jobs is Hakan Yılmaz's producing operation, which is where most of Aktan's stage work of the past decade has sat.