Gupse Özay

Total Control of the Comedy

Gupse Özay is not an actress who sits around waiting for the phone to ring with the offer of her life. In 2012, she auditioned for the series Yalan Dünya and ended up stealing the spotlight from the entire main cast with the role of Nurhayat. That early success on Turkish television could have been a comfort trap, but she chose to leap into film on her own terms.

In 2014, she decided that if she wanted strong female characters, she would have to write them herself. That is how Deliha was born, a film in which Özay not only took the lead role but also wrote the entire screenplay. It was a risky bet in a market where physical comedy and absurd humor are usually reserved for men.

The Turkish industry was not used to seeing a woman write the jokes.

But the box office numbers silenced any doubts in the studio offices in Istanbul. With Deliha, she drew more than 1.5 million moviegoers to theaters. That success allowed her to build her own working methodology, where physical transformation and ugliness take precedence over the usual aesthetics of Ottoman productions.

The Profitability of Domestic Chaos

Before shooting Görümce in 2016, she spent months studying toxic family dynamics to parody them. In this film she played an obsessive sister-in-law, and once again audiences responded by filling the theaters. Gupse Özay quickly realized that the secret to her career lay not in pure acting but in observing everyday miseries.

And the gamble paid off.

In 2018, she went a step further and took on directing Deliha 2. She became the first woman in the history of Turkish cinema to write, direct and star in the same big-budget commercial film. She was not chasing the applause of intellectual critics or European festivals. Her goal was to break box office records with stories any middle-class family could recognize.

The Power of Observation

For the film Eltilerin Savaşı, in 2020 she focused on the extreme rivalry between daughters-in-law. The movie sold more than three million tickets at a time when streaming was already beginning to cut into theater attendance. Özay builds her scripts around interwoven sketches that keep a frenetic pace so viewers don't have time to question the logic of the plot.

In 2024, she premiered Lohusa, a project in which she explored postpartum psychology from a distorted, comedic angle. During the writing phase, she isolated herself to collect real-life stories from women who had gone through that stage. The result was a production that stayed at number one at the box office for several consecutive weeks.

Unlike other members of her generation, she avoids period dramas and action plots. Her career rests on her ability to poke fun at the country's most sacred institutions, such as marriage and motherhood. She doesn't use stunt doubles, and she doesn't mind looking disheveled in front of the camera if it helps the gag.

The production of Lohusa had a marketing budget that exceeded the usual standards for a comedy in Turkey, and it wrapped its theatrical run with more than two million moviegoers in cinemas.