Yosi Mizrahi

Dormen, Esek and the 1990s Istanbul stage

Yusuf Mizrahi, known professionally as Yosi, was born in Istanbul on 2 October 1971 into the city's Jewish community, and came up through the commercial theatre companies that dominated Istanbul in the early 1990s rather than through a conservatoire route. His professional stage career began at Dormen Tiyatrosu, the company founded by Haldun Dormen, in the musical Şarkılar Susarsa in 1993, followed by Alo Arkadaş in 1994.

From there he moved between several of the better-known independent houses — Espri Standartları Enstitüsü Kurumu, usually shortened to Esek, as well as Tiyatro İstanbul and Tiyatrokare — building the sort of repertoire, largely comedy and boulevard material, that keeps an actor working year-round in Turkey. The director Uğur Uludağ recurs across that early stretch of credits. Nothing about the trajectory was sudden: the stage work accumulated across three decades, and the recorded list of productions runs from Şarkılar Susarsa in 1993 through to Seninle Evlenir Miyim?, in which he played Baran, from 2019 onwards.

Forty series, sixteen films and a decade of adverts

Mizrahi first appeared on camera in 1994, and the screen work has since outnumbered the stage work by a wide margin. He has appeared in roughly sixteen feature films up to 2022, among them Yavuz Turgul's Eşkıya in 1996, Eylül Fırtınası in 1999, Aşk Geliyorum Demez in 2008 and Kin in 2021, and in more than forty television series spread across the major Turkish broadcasters — Kanal D, Star TV, Show TV, atv, TRT 1 and FOX. Alongside that he has presented programmes on several channels and was, for a long stretch, a familiar face in Turkish advertising, which is how a good deal of the audience first came to recognise him.

The most recent screen credit of note is Mahsun J, the streaming comedy made for the Gain platform, which premiered on 26 January 2024 and ran until its final episode on 31 October 2025. Mizrahi played the character Ateş across ten episodes between 2024 and 2025. He also returned to the long-running police procedural Arka Sokaklar in 2024. Neither role reinvented him, but both kept him on screens through the period in which his stage career took its current shape.

Aşk Listesi: the work that matters now

The production that has defined the last two years is Aşk Listesi, a Turkish staging of the Canadian playwright Norm Foster's The Love List. Foster is the most frequently produced dramatist in Canadian history, and his work has travelled well into Turkish commercial theatre. This version was translated and adapted by Eylül Aktürk, directed by Serkan Üstüner and produced by Bir Poetika Yapım, with a cast of three: Sevinç Erbulak, Hakan Bilgin and Mizrahi.

The premise is a small one worked hard. Kenan, a statistician, is given an odd present by his writer friend Oktay for his fiftieth birthday — the instruction to write down ten qualities of his ideal woman. A woman called Melis then arrives in possession of all of them, and the evening becomes an argument about whether the fantasy is any improvement on the life it was meant to correct. Performances began on 14 November 2024.

The production was subsequently named Yılın Komedi Yapımı — comedy production of the year — at the 25th Direklerarası Seyirci Ödülleri, the long-established Istanbul audience awards, and the billing has followed it onto every regional poster since. Local press coverage of the tour has consistently described an audience laughing throughout rather than an evening of ideas, which is a fair account of what Foster writes.

A rabbit for children, and a two-hander he runs himself

Mizrahi's second current stage strand is Kadife Tavşan, BKM's adaptation of Margery Williams's The Velveteen Rabbit, adapted and directed by Alper Kul and Sevinç Erbulak. It opened on 23 February 2025 at Maximum Uniq Hall in Istanbul and runs 52 minutes, pitched at children between four and thirteen. Aslı Tandoğan plays the rabbit; Mizrahi plays Fırtına, with Mehmet Aybars Kaya and Uzay Karaca alternating as Ali. Speaking about the production in February 2025, Mizrahi framed the aim in terms of interaction rather than instruction, saying the company wanted children to engage with the performers and come away with something they would not forget. The adaptation deliberately avoids the rescue narrative of the original, pushing instead the idea that a child can get through difficulty as themselves.

The third piece is Öldüresiye Sevgili, written by Turgut Azer Vurkır and produced by Istanbul Art Office–Novestage. It is a two-hander played by Buket Dereoğlu and Mizrahi, and Mizrahi directs it — the clearest sign to date that he is now building work rather than only taking it. The set-up is domestic: two people with incompatible expectations sharing a house across one increasingly uncontrolled evening of confessions and mishaps.

Where he stands in autumn 2026

Mizrahi is presently working two touring productions in parallel across Turkey. Aşk Listesi has dates listed from early October to 20 December 2026 in at least a dozen provinces — Istanbul on both sides of the Bosphorus, Ankara, Izmir, Bursa, Antalya, Bolu, Sakarya, Manisa, Balıkesir, Nevşehir and four separate Muğla towns — while Öldüresiye Sevgili fills the gaps with its own dates at Kartal's Bülent Ecevit Kültür Merkezi, Sakarya's Kale Sahne, HOP Sahne in Istanbul and venues in Ankara, Antalya, Edremit and Bandırma. The Aşk Listesi tour has been running at this intensity since at least February 2025, when it played the Torbalı Chamber of Commerce hall outside Izmir, and it was still filling large regional rooms on 31 March 2026 at the Kemal Sunal Hall of the Malatya Congress and Culture Centre.

The one non-performing appearance of the year came on 29 April 2026, when Mizrahi and Hakan Bilgin spoke to students at Ondokuz Mayıs University in Samsun as part of the Perdeden Kampüse Söyleşi series, run by the university's youth club. Bilgin talked about obstacles as openings; Mizrahi's advice was flatter and more characteristic — that there is limited value in being bound to a plan, and rather more in finding meaning in whatever is actually happening.

The motorcycle in the car park

The detail colleagues tend to mention first is the bike. Mizrahi bought his first motorcycle, an ice-blue BMW F 650 GS, in 2003, and by 2020 was riding a navy Honda Pan European year-round, stopping only for snow. He arrives at rehearsals on it, toured the Istanbul–Bodrum road repeatedly during the two years he lived in Bodrum, and has talked about an ambition to ride to the Dolomites. He has also recruited: both Hakan Bilgin, his co-star in Aşk Listesi, and Murat Akkoyunlu took up riding after him.

Asked in April 2020 about speed, his answer was that life moves quickly enough without adding to it. For an actor whose current working life consists of driving between municipal culture centres in a dozen provinces, the remark reads less as philosophy than as a working method.