Seyirci Kötüyü Seviyor, Ben Bunun Canlı Kanıtıyım

Seyirci Kötüyü Seviyor, Ben Bunun Canlı Kanıtıyım

Gazete Oksijen — 11 November 2022
Interview by Binnaz Saktanber

This interview arrives at a revealing moment in Nejat İşler’s life.

Tamirhane is reaching cinemas.

He has just completed a long period associated with Gümüşlük.

He has decades of acting behind him.

And when Binnaz Saktanber asks him to look back at his life and describe it, İşler does not choose:

successful,

interesting,

fortunate,

rebellious.

He chooses one word:

“Yorgun.”

Tired.

Then he explains:

he has worked since childhood and never really stopped.

The Hidden Theme Was Work All Along

This statement changes how earlier interviews can be read.

In 2010, İşler complained about the television system.

At the time, the problem could look specific:

long shooting schedules,

lack of rest,

celebrity pressure.

By 2022, he places that exhaustion inside a much longer biography.

He says he has worked since childhood.

So the fatigue is not only from television.

It is cumulative.

Work before fame.

Acting.

Television.

Cinema.

Writing.

Football administration.

Public life.

The deeper issue may simply be:

a life that rarely stopped.

Gümüşlük Is Over

The interview also closes one of the most important periods in the archive.

Asked whether he has moved back to Istanbul, İşler says that he has closed his home in Gümüşlük and is staying in Istanbul.

He does not even describe this as a permanent move.

More radically, he says he currently has no particular desire to “return” somewhere or remain somewhere permanently.

That statement is important.

Gümüşlük had once represented:

freedom,

distance,

local life,

football,

less industry,

more control over time.

By 2022, it no longer performs the same function.

The Place Changed

İşler explains why.

During the pandemic, many more people moved into the area.

He became increasingly easy to find.

People knew where he was.

Bodrum became more crowded and more urban.

Traffic appeared in a place partly chosen to escape traffic.

His conclusion is practical:

if the conditions begin resembling the city he left, the distinction loses meaning.

This is why the archive should never turn Gümüşlük into a romantic ending.

It was not:

Nejat İşler finally found paradise.

It was:

a place that worked for a period.

Then the conditions changed.

Freedom Is Portable

This confirms something already implicit in the 2017 interview.

The principle was never really:

live in Gümüşlük.

The principle was:

protect control over your time.

If a place stops helping with that, attachment to the place itself becomes unnecessary.

This makes İşler’s philosophy less sentimental than it sometimes appears.

He can leave even the place that once symbolized freedom.

Gümüşlükspor Ends the Same Way

Asked why he left Gümüşlükspor, İşler gives an equally unsentimental answer.

He says he had taken the club as far as he wanted and that what came next belonged to professionals.

Then he compares following the club after leaving to checking an ex-partner’s Instagram every day.

It is finished.

Let it be finished.

This is classic Nejat İşler.

No heroic legacy speech.

No attempt to preserve ownership over the project.

He participated.

Then left.

Six Years as a Film

Asked whether the Gümüşlükspor experience could become a film, he jokes that he already made the film there:

for six years.

The joke is revealing.

He experiences life itself through narrative.

A period begins.

Characters appear.

Problems develop.

It ends.

Then it becomes a story.

This connects neatly with the writing and memory themes that became prominent after 2014.

Tamirhane and the Desire for Something Fun

İşler says he accepted Tamirhane partly because he was tired of excessively heavy projects.

During the pandemic, he kept wondering why nobody was making something entertaining when people were already exhausted by real life.

Then the script arrived.

He read it quickly and agreed almost immediately.

This is an interesting late-career adjustment.

His reputation had been built partly through dark material.

Now he is asking:

Must everything also be heavy?

Refusing the Sequel Economy

One of the strongest sections concerns sequels.

İşler says he generally does not want second installments.

He openly calls the second Kaybedenler Kulübü a mistake.

He also says the second season of Saygı was a mistake.

Why?

Because once something succeeds, repeating it can become primarily commercial.

His suggestion is simple:

if the team works well together, make something new instead of repeating the same characters.

This is a remarkably consistent anti-career position.

Success normally creates a franchise.

İşler distrusts the franchise.

Success Should Not Become Repetition

This connects directly with his discomfort about celebrity identity.

A successful character becomes a demand:

do it again.

A successful film becomes:

make another.

A successful public persona becomes:

keep being that person.

İşler resists all three.

The underlying problem is repetition.

The Good Character Problem

In Tamirhane, İşler plays Yılmaz, whom the interviewer describes as perhaps one of the kindest characters of his career.

İşler jokes that audiences will probably see him as a fool.

Then he makes the observation that gives the interview its title:

audiences used to like good characters.

Now, he says, they prefer bad ones.

He presents himself as living evidence because audiences overwhelmingly remember his darker roles.

This is one of the most important statements in the archive.

The Audience Loves the Villain

Earlier, in the Episode interview, İşler explained his technique:

“Kötüyü kötü oynamıyorum.”

Now we see the cultural consequence.

Humanizing a bad character makes the character compelling.

But compelling can become attractive.

The audience may begin loving precisely the person the story expected them to question.

This creates an ethical tension inside performance.

Which Roles Do People Remember?

İşler gives a revealing informal map of his audience.

Men often approach him because of Barda.

More “modern” men, as he puts it, often come through Kaybedenler Kulübü.

Women remember different television roles depending on generation.

This is useful because it shows that there is not one Nejat İşler audience.

Different groups have built different Nejats.

Barda Fifteen Years Later

The strongest retrospective material concerns Barda.

The interviewer points out that the violence depicted in the film no longer feels remote from daily news.

İşler says the film had been intended as a warning.

People told them the violence made them physically sick.

His response is basically:

that was the point.

The audience was supposed to feel sick and then reject real violence.

But fifteen years later, he concludes pessimistically that the warning did not work.

This is an unusually powerful comparison with 2007.

From Warning to Failure

In the 2007 interviews, Barda asks:

why can we not live together?

What happens to justice?

How does ordinary violence become possible?

In 2022, İşler is effectively evaluating the film’s historical impact.

The answer is bleak.

The film warned.

Society did not listen.

The violence continued.

This gives the archive something rare:

an artist returning to a work fifteen years later and judging whether its warning mattered.

Barda and Misogynistic Violence

The interviewer asks whether the film can now be read in relation to contemporary misogynistic subcultures and violence against women.

İşler says that this was essentially part of what they wanted to address, but he does not believe the message was adequately understood.

This makes Barda more than a shocking crime film in his retrospective interpretation.

It becomes a film about violent male entitlement.

The Strange Fate of Dark Films

İşler also remembers that critics told audiences not to see Barda because of its violence.

He says something similar happened with Mustafa Hakkında Her Şey.

This seems to frustrate him.

He sees the disturbing content as part of the argument.

Others sometimes interpret showing violence as endorsing or exploiting violence.

The disagreement is fundamental.

Can cinema depict something ugly in order to condemn it?

İşler’s answer remains yes.

“Ben Hazırım”

The interview also briefly touches on queer interpretation in Mustafa Hakkında Her Şey.

When asked whether the story can be understood as a heterosexualized version of a gay narrative, İşler says he sees something like that underneath the film and responds without discomfort to the possibility of such material.

This is a small part of a much larger interview, but it fits the broader pattern.

He is less interested in maintaining a rigid masculine screen identity than the mythology surrounding him might suggest.

“I Am Easy to Work With”

Another revealing contradiction appears when Saktanber asks about his reputation.

İşler says people outside the industry may think he is difficult to work with.

Inside the industry, he claims the opposite:

he sees himself as highly adaptable professionally.

Again:

public Nejat

versus

working Nejat.

The distinction first appeared decades earlier.

It remains unresolved.

The Myth Is Harder to Kill Than the Person

By 2022, İşler has spent years rejecting simplified identities.

Yet the mythology survives.

Hard man.

Difficult man.

Dark actor.

Rebel.

Perhaps that is one of the lessons of celebrity:

once a public character becomes culturally useful, the individual cannot easily remove it.

Aging Without Nostalgia

The tone of the interview is retrospective, but not nostalgic.

İşler looks back at:

career,

Gümüşlük,

football,

films.

Yet he does not seem desperate to preserve any period.

He can say:

that ended.

That sequel was a mistake.

That place changed.

That project belonged to another period.

This is a notable form of aging.

The Ability to End Things

One of the strongest late-career themes may actually be:

ending.

End a series.

Leave Istanbul.

Leave Gümüşlük.

Leave a football club.

Do not make the sequel.

Let a successful character finish.

This is nearly the opposite of conventional career logic.

Career systems try to extend successful things.

İşler increasingly seems interested in knowing when something is over.

A Useful Comparison with 2017

The contrast with the “buy time” interview is particularly illuminating.

2017:

Gümüşlük is part of the solution.

2022:

Gümüşlük has stopped solving the problem.

So he leaves.

The principle survives precisely because the geography does not.

A Useful Comparison with 2019

In Socrates, İşler described places as meaningful largely because of the people attached to them.

The same fluidity appears here.

No location is permanently meaningful by itself.

Lives move.

People disappear.

Places change.

The story continues elsewhere.

A Useful Comparison with Episode

Episode gives us the actor’s method:

do not reduce bad characters to evil symbols.

Oksijen gives us the audience response:

people may end up loving the bad characters more than the good ones.

Together these two interviews form one of the most interesting pairs in the archive.

Actor: humanize evil.

Audience: becomes fascinated by evil.

That creates a tension no actor can completely control.

Why This Interview Matters

The 11 November 2022 Gazete Oksijen interview is one of the strongest retrospective documents in Nejat İşler’s archive.

It closes several long-running stories.

Gümüşlük is no longer home.

Gümüşlükspor is finished.

The fantasy that geographical withdrawal can permanently solve the problem of modern life has weakened.

At the same time, İşler looks back on his acting career and identifies another uncomfortable pattern:

audiences often love his bad characters more than his good ones.

That observation connects directly to Barda, Ercüment Çözer and his long-standing method of humanizing morally dark people.

The interview also introduces another mature principle:

successful things do not always need to continue.

Sometimes the right decision is to let a film, character, place or period end.

Perhaps the most revealing opening answer remains the simplest:

Asked what kind of life he has lived, Nejat İşler says:

“Yorgun.”

After decades of trying to protect his time, the reason becomes clear.

He has been working almost all of it.