Çağatay Ulusoy

The Contract Signed on a Runway

On the night of October 15, 2010, Çağatay Ulusoy won the Best Model of Turkey competition and received his first job offer as an actor just two hours after leaving the stage. That contract to star in Adını Feriha Koydum in 2011 changed the plans of a young man who until then had only thought about professional basketball and forest irrigation systems.

And he accepted the challenge without ever having set foot on a film set.

Over the two years the series ran, the actor had to learn his craft under suffocating media pressure in Istanbul. The show's ratings success was massive, but the actor avoided stagnation by accepting a role in the film Anadolu Kartalları that same 2011. In this movie he played a combat pilot and had to undergo real military training for the flight sequences.

In 2013, the project that transformed his public image into a mass phenomenon beyond Turkey's borders arrived. The series Medcezir was the official adaptation of the American production The O.C., and in it Ulusoy played Yaman Koper. But what mattered wasn't just the script; it was how the actor managed his personal brand through a visual style that influenced men's fashion in Turkey for three winters in a row.

And the gamble paid off.

The Alliance with Global Streaming

After the end of Medcezir in 2015, the actor sought projects with a darker tone to move away from the young heartthrob image. In 2016 he starred in İçerde, playing an undercover police officer infiltrating the mafia. The production demanded grueling physical preparation and hand-to-hand combat classes because the director insisted on minimizing the use of stunt doubles in the risky scenes.

Netflix came calling in 2018 to lead the platform's first original Turkish production. The series was titled The Protector (Hakan: Muhafız) and ran for four seasons until 2020. The financial deal was one of the largest in the Turkish industry up to that point and allowed his face to reach millions of homes in 190 countries simultaneously.

The actor then decided to change his physical appearance.

In 2021 he starred on the big screen in Paper Lives (Kağıttan Hayat), playing a sick garbage collector in the poor neighborhoods of Istanbul. For this role he had to lose weight drastically and spend weeks living alongside real workers in the manual recycling industry. At this point in his career, he began getting involved in the executive production of his projects to control the final editing of the works.

Production and Creative Control

In 2023, he premiered Terzi (The Tailor), a series originally conceived for free-to-air television that ended up on Netflix after a bidding war among platforms. The three seasons were shot back to back to optimize the costs of the period sets in Istanbul. Ulusoy played a haute couture tailor with a traumatic family past.

In early 2024, the actor returned to traditional television with the series Gaddar. He plays a soldier who returns from the front and is forced to work as a hitman to pay off family debts. The shoot ran at a pace of one 140-minute episode per week, which forced the crew to work 16-hour days on outdoor locations during the winter.

It was a purely logistical decision.

At the same time, in 2024, he appeared in the science fiction series Kübra, exploring the relationship between artificial intelligence and religious faith. Ulusoy now manages his contracts through his own business structure and personally supervises scripts before production companies begin the pre-production phase. The series Gaddar wrapped up its first season with an estimated budget of 1.5 million Turkish lira per episode in camera and post-production operating costs.