Harper’s Bazaar: Barda, Violence and Justice

Harper’s Bazaar: Barda, Violence and Justice

Harper’s Bazaar Türkiye — February 2007

By early 2007, the public image surrounding Nejat İşler had changed considerably.

Four years earlier, during the Gülbeyaz period, the entertainment press was beginning to describe him as a new leading man.

Now he was appearing on screen as something very different.

In Serdar Akar’s Barda, İşler played the leader of a group that subjects a group of young people to extreme violence.

It was a deliberately disturbing role.

And it moved him further away from the conventional romantic leading-man identity that television had helped construct around him.

In an interview published in the February 2007 issue of Harper’s Bazaar Türkiye, İşler spoke about the violence of Barda, the problem of justice, the difficulty of living together and, on a more personal level, loneliness and relationships.

The interview captures an important transition.

The public was beginning to see Nejat İşler not merely as an attractive television actor, but as a performer willing to inhabit morally uncomfortable characters.

Why Can’t We Live Together?

For İşler, the central question of Barda is larger than the violent events depicted on screen.

He describes the film as asking a basic social question:

Why are we unable to live together?

This matters because it prevents the film from being reduced to a spectacle of cruelty.

Violence is visible.

But violence is not the final subject.

Underneath it is a problem of coexistence.

How do people who share the same city, country or social space begin to see one another as enemies?

What happens when ordinary restraints disappear?

And what kind of justice becomes possible after violence has already taken place?

These questions would remain relevant to İşler’s later discussions of the film.

Fifteen years later, in a 2022 interview, he would describe Barda as a warning whose purpose was partly to make viewers physically uncomfortable with violence.

The continuity is striking.

The young İşler of 2007 does not present violence as exciting.

The older İşler of 2022 does not nostalgically celebrate the brutality of the film.

In both periods, discomfort is part of the point.

Violence and Justice Are Connected

The interview also places considerable emphasis on justice.

For İşler, one of the disturbing aspects of the story is that justice does not appear as a single stable idea.

The people committing violence have one understanding of what they are entitled to do.

The victims experience justice from another position.

The legal system enters from yet another perspective.

A surviving contemporary transcript of a separate Barda interview preserves İşler’s explanation more fully: the film questions how the meaning of justice changes according to the person and the position from which it is viewed.

This is a more interesting interpretation than simply dividing the characters into good and evil.

It asks what people do when they begin constructing moral permission for themselves.

Violence rarely introduces itself by saying:

I am evil.

It usually arrives with an explanation.

A grievance.

A humiliation.

A belief in deserved punishment.

A sense that the other person somehow deserves what is happening.

The Ordinary Person and the Capacity for Violence

The surviving Barda material also reveals something important about İşler’s acting method.

To approach the character, he did not begin by imagining an exotic monster.

He began with the opposite assumption.

An ordinary human being can become capable of killing another person.

This idea becomes central to understanding many of his later dark characters.

Nejat İşler does not seem particularly interested in playing evil as a separate species of human being.

He looks for the ordinary mechanisms underneath it.

Anger.

Humiliation.

Desire.

Fear.

Power.

Self-justification.

This method would become much clearer years later when he discussed Ercüment Çözer.

His later formulation is essentially:

do not play a bad person by simply acting “bad.”

The character still needs recognizably human motivations.

The roots of that philosophy are visible in Barda.

A Very Different Actor from the 2003 Image

The contrast with the 2003 Gülbeyaz interview is sharp.

Then:

Nejat İşler was being discussed as a new leading man.

Now:

he was playing one of the most disturbing characters in contemporary Turkish cinema.

This shift was not accidental.

The conventional route for a newly famous television actor would have been to protect a desirable public image.

İşler moved in the opposite direction.

Barda risks damaging precisely the image that television celebrity normally tries to maintain.

The character is not charming.

He is not misunderstood in a romantic sense.

The film gives the audience little opportunity to enjoy identifying with him.

That makes the choice important.

It suggests that İşler’s professional ambition was increasingly connected to range rather than image maintenance.

Trusting Serdar Akar

Serdar Akar was central to İşler’s decision to take the project.

Contemporary Barda interviews show unusually strong trust between actor and director.

İşler regarded Akar as one of the important figures in the contemporary revival of Turkish cinema and repeatedly emphasized that the opportunity to work with him mattered greatly.

That relationship would become significant again later.

In 2010, when İşler was increasingly talking about withdrawing from television series, he accepted the role of Ercüment Çözer in Behzat Ç. partly through his relationship with Serdar Akar.

The result was one of the most enduring characters of his career.

So Barda is important for more than the film itself.

It also strengthens a professional relationship that later leads toward Ercüment Çözer.

The Beginning of the “Dark Nejat” Image

There is an irony here.

İşler resisted being categorized as a conventional leading man.

But escaping one public category helped create another.

After characters such as the gang leader in Barda, audiences increasingly associated him with:

• darkness,
• violence,
• masculinity,
• rebellion,
• cynicism,
• emotional damage,
• moral ambiguity.

The romantic leading man was replaced by the anti-hero.

This would become even stronger after Kaybedenler Kulübü and Behzat Ç.

Once again, however, there is a gap between the public image and İşler’s own understanding of himself.

The public sees:

a dangerous man playing dangerous men.

The actor appears more interested in:

why an apparently ordinary person becomes dangerous.

That distinction is essential.

Violence Outside the Screen

The 2007 period was complicated because İşler’s public reputation and the violent character he played sometimes began to overlap in the press.

During the promotion of Barda, entertainment news also focused intensely on his nightlife and confrontational public image.

A widely reported incident following an appearance by the Barda team on Okan Bayülgen’s Makina became part of this atmosphere. Contemporary reporting concentrated more on alleged intoxication and backstage conflict than on the film itself.

This is important for the archive because it shows the machinery through which a celebrity persona develops.

The actor plays a violent character.

The press reports a confrontation.

The public begins connecting the two.

Eventually:

the role and the person begin contaminating each other’s image.

This pattern would follow İşler for years.

Loneliness Behind the Hard Exterior

The Harper’s Bazaar interview is particularly useful because it does not remain inside the violent world of Barda.

It shifts unexpectedly toward private life.

İşler speaks quite openly about wanting a relationship.

The original report foregrounded this material with a deliberately provocative headline, but the broader idea is simpler: he says that he wants a woman in his life and wants not merely sex but also companionship and shared time.

This creates an interesting contradiction with the emerging public persona.

Externally:

a violent screen character,

nightlife,

rebellion,

masculine confidence.

Internally, at least in this interview:

a fairly ordinary desire not to be alone.

This tension would repeatedly appear in later interviews.

The public Nejat İşler often seems radically independent.

The private Nejat İşler repeatedly speaks about companionship, friendship and the need for other people.

Not a Romantic Rebellion

There is a temptation to turn this period into a romantic narrative.

The rebellious actor rejects convention.

He plays dangerous characters.

He lives outside respectable celebrity rules.

But that reading is too simple.

One of the interesting things about İşler’s interviews is how often he removes the glamour from rebellion.

Violence has consequences.

Fame becomes exhausting.

Nightlife is not necessarily freedom.

Being alone is not always independence.

And being perceived as a hard man does not mean identifying with that image.

This is why Barda matters so much in the archive.

It establishes many of the symbols later attached to Nejat İşler while simultaneously showing that his own interpretation of those symbols is more complicated.

From Barda to Ercüment Çözer

The line from Barda to Ercüment Çözer is particularly revealing.

Both characters can be described as violent men.

But İşler’s interest appears to lie less in their violence than in the mental structure that makes violence possible.

Years later, discussing Ercüment, he would emphasize the importance of giving a bad character human qualities rather than performing evil as a theatrical pose.

This makes Barda look like an early laboratory for a method he later develops more explicitly.

The question is not:

How do I look frightening?

It is:

How does this person understand himself well enough to continue doing terrible things?

A Useful Comparison with 2022

The 2022 Gazete Oksijen interview provides perhaps the best retrospective interpretation of Barda.

By then, İşler says that men still commonly approach him because of the film.

He also describes the movie as a warning.

People complained that watching it made them physically uncomfortable.

His response, fifteen years later, is essentially that discomfort was intentional.

The audience was supposed to feel sickened by the violence so that it would reject that violence outside the cinema.

The tragic part of his retrospective judgment is that he no longer seems convinced that the warning succeeded.

The social violence the film attempted to confront did not disappear.

Why This Interview Matters

The February 2007 Harper’s Bazaar interview documents a decisive change in Nejat İşler’s public and artistic identity.

The actor who had recently been described as a new leading man was deliberately entering a much darker cinematic space.

But the importance of Barda is not simply that İşler successfully played a violent man.

It reveals an approach to acting that becomes clearer throughout his later career:

evil should be investigated from inside ordinary human psychology rather than treated as something alien.

The interview also establishes another recurring contradiction.

Public culture increasingly constructs Nejat İşler as a hard, rebellious and dangerous masculine figure.

At the same time, İşler’s own comments reveal concerns about coexistence, justice, loneliness and companionship.

The difference between those two Nejats — the public figure and the person speaking in interviews — will become one of the most persistent themes of the archive.