Episode: Kötüyü Kötü Oynamıyorum

Episode: Kötüyü Kötü Oynamıyorum

Episode — Issue 27 / web archive 27 January 2023
Interview by Onur Bayrakçeken

This Episode interview is one of the best documents for understanding Nejat İşler as an actor.

Not the celebrity.

Not the public rebel.

Not the Gümüşlük figure.

The actor.

The conversation moves through Saygı, Ercüment Çözer, 9,75, Barda, Kaybedenler Kulübü, television, digital platforms and the cultural atmosphere of the 1990s.

At the center is a remarkably simple statement about his method:

“Kötüyü kötü oynamıyorum.”

He does not play a bad person by merely performing “badness.”

That sentence helps explain a large part of his career.

Why Ercüment Çözer Works

Ercüment Çözer appears in relatively few episodes of Behzat Ç., yet became one of the most memorable characters in the series.

When asked why, İşler does not take easy credit.

He calls the popularity of the character a sociological phenomenon.

That answer is revealing.

He does not say:

because I performed him brilliantly.

Because audiences love charisma.

Because Ercüment is cool.

Instead, he admits that the full explanation belongs partly to the audience and the society watching the character.

This creates useful distance between actor and role.

Humanizing the Bad Character

İşler does, however, identify one thing he contributes.

When he plays strange, marginal or morally dark characters, he tries to reveal their human and entertaining sides.

Then comes the key sentence:

“Kötüyü kötü oynamıyorum.”

This is an important acting principle.

A weak performance of evil begins with an external label:

this man is bad.

So the actor:

looks threatening,

speaks threateningly,

moves threateningly.

İşler’s method appears to begin elsewhere.

The character does not wake up every morning thinking:

I am a villain.

He has desires.

Pleasures.

Logic.

Humor.

Weaknesses.

A personal explanation for what he does.

The actor must find those things.

From Barda to Ercüment

This philosophy connects directly with Barda.

In 2007, İşler had already approached extreme violence through the possibility that an apparently ordinary human being could become capable of terrible actions.

The question was not how to imitate a monster.

It was how a human being reaches the point where monstrous behavior becomes possible.

Years later, Ercüment develops the same problem in a different form.

Ercüment is intelligent.

Funny.

Cultured.

Charismatic.

And profoundly dangerous.

If İşler played only the danger, the character would become flat.

The human qualities make him more disturbing.

The Audience Loves the Bad Character

There is a paradox here.

Making a bad character more human can also make the character more attractive.

That is exactly what appears to have happened with Ercüment.

Audiences enjoy him.

Quote him.

Remember him.

Want him to return.

İşler recognizes the problem.

His father’s comment, recalled in the interview, is useful: if bad people never disappear from television stories, perhaps audiences begin feeling that evil always survives.

This adds an ethical complication to the actor’s success.

The more convincing the villain, the greater the danger that the audience begins admiring what was meant to disturb it.

Saygı Expands Ercüment

Saygı gives Ercüment something he never had in Behzat Ç.:

his own narrative world.

That is significant.

In Behzat Ç., he appears from the outside.

A disruptive force.

In Saygı, viewers spend more time inside the moral logic around him.

The question of respect becomes broader.

Not simply:

why does this man demand personal respect?

But:

what happens in a society where people increasingly feel humiliated, ignored or powerless?

This helps explain why İşler describes Ercüment’s popularity sociologically.

The character may be fictional.

The anger surrounding him is not.

Digital Platforms Solve an Old Problem

The interview also gives us a very useful continuation of İşler’s criticism of television production.

For years, he had complained about traditional Turkish television schedules.

Extremely long episodes.

Little preparation time.

Continuous production.

Exhausting sets.

Digital platforms change that.

İşler says that on digital projects there is finally time to prepare.

The season has a defined beginning and end.

Eight episodes can be approached more like making a film.

This is extremely important in the chronology.

2010 Was Not Anti-Television

The Episode interview proves something we have been arguing throughout the archive.

In 2010, İşler did not hate television as a medium.

He hated a production model.

If television can offer:

• preparation,
• finite episode counts,
• reasonable schedules,
• cinematic production conditions,

then he is willing to return.

This means his earlier withdrawal was not aesthetic snobbery.

It was largely about labor conditions and time.

The Medium Changes, the Principle Does Not

The progression is now clear:

2010: traditional television consumes too much life.

2015: series are over, cinema continues.

2021-era digital production: series can become possible again if the conditions resemble cinema.

The principle remains consistent:

control over time and quality of work matter more than the category of medium.

A Young Nejat Inside Subculture

The interview also explores İşler’s youth inside the rock, punk and alternative cultural atmosphere of the 1990s.

This material is especially valuable because Kaybedenler Kulübü is often treated as if it introduced him to that world.

It did not.

He had already lived close to:

• rock music,
• underground scenes,
• alternative cultural spaces,
• different forms of urban youth identity.

The film therefore connected with a cultural environment he recognized personally.

Kaybedenler Kulübü Shows One 1990s

İşler makes a particularly interesting comparison between Kaybedenler Kulübü and 9,75.

Kaybedenler Kulübü, he says, allowed him to look at the more enjoyable side of the 1990s.

With 9,75, he could look at the darker side.

This is an excellent archival distinction.

The 1990s were not one thing.

There was:

music,

radio,

bars,

alternative culture,

urban freedom.

But also:

political violence,

fear,

state violence,

trauma,

social fracture.

Two films allow İşler to occupy both memories.

The 1990s as Personal and Political Memory

This is important because nostalgia often simplifies decades.

The 1990s can become:

cool music,

old Istanbul,

radio culture,

youth.

9,75 interrupts that nostalgia.

The period also contains darkness.

This makes the film particularly compatible with İşler’s broader tendency to resist simple public narratives.

Even a decade has more than one identity.

9,75 and Trauma

In 9,75, İşler plays a man living with physical illness and an unresolved psychological trauma.

He describes the character as knowing that something is wrong without being able fully to remember what happened.

The character must search backward before death.

That narrative has an obvious resonance with İşler’s later interest in memory.

The difference is that here memory becomes traumatic.

What happens when the past is not something one simply chooses to remember beautifully?

What if the past refuses to disappear?

Gezi as Self-Examination

İşler also connects the film’s later period with Gezi.

He says that during Gezi, seeing younger people articulate what they were doing caused him to look back at himself and re-evaluate his own position.

This is one of the interview’s more politically revealing moments.

He does not primarily describe Gezi through party politics.

He describes it as a trigger for self-examination.

Younger people become a mirror.

That is consistent with another long-term pattern in İşler’s interviews:

public events often become personal questions.

Acting as Cultural Memory

Seen together, Kaybedenler Kulübü and 9,75 turn acting into a form of historical memory.

One film remembers:

the pleasurable alternative culture of the 1990s.

The other remembers:

its darker political atmosphere and consequences.

The actor participates in both memories.

That makes his filmography culturally interesting beyond individual performances.

From Outsider to Interpreter

The early Nejat İşler persona was often described as an outsider.

But by this stage, a better word may be:

interpreter.

He interprets:

dark characters,

subcultures,

masculine identities,

urban memory,

political trauma.

That is a more useful description than rebel.

Career as Accident Rather Than Master Plan

The Episode interview also returns to how his career formed.

İşler does not describe a carefully planned climb.

Television opened doors.

Certain roles produced other roles.

Cinema became increasingly important.

The path appears contingent.

This fits his longstanding distance from conventional ambition.

The career happened through opportunities and choices rather than a tightly managed celebrity strategy.

Why Cinema Mattered

İşler has repeatedly treated television partly as a route toward cinema.

That distinction is important in understanding his professional values.

Cinema offers:

defined projects,

different characters,

greater concentration,

finite production periods.

All of those qualities fit his desire to avoid permanent industrial occupation.

The Strange Success of Marginal Characters

There is another paradox.

İşler says unusual, marginal or dark characters often become popular when he plays them.

This means the actor famous for resisting conventional celebrity becomes famous precisely through characters that also appear to resist convention.

The outsider becomes mainstream.

The marginal character becomes popular culture.

Again, Nejat İşler’s career repeatedly turns rebellion into visibility.

Public Image Returns Through the Roles

This loops back to one of the archive’s oldest problems.

The more convincingly İşler performs unconventional characters, the more the public uses those characters to define İşler himself.

Kaan.

Ercüment.

The violent man in Barda.

Each role strengthens the mythology of Nejat İşler as:

dark,

rebellious,

marginal,

dangerous,

independent.

Yet the actor’s own method is based precisely on refusing simple categories.

He does not even allow the villain to remain only a villain.

Complexity as Method

Perhaps that is the deepest principle revealed by this interview.

İşler looks for contradiction.

The bad person has humor.

The marginal person has ordinary needs.

The 1990s contain pleasure and darkness.

Television can be oppressive in one production model and creatively satisfying in another.

Nothing stays inside one category.

That may explain both his acting and his broader public resistance to labels.

A Useful Comparison with 2007

In Barda, the question was:

How can an ordinary person become violent?

In the Episode interview, the answer has matured into a performance principle:

Do not play evil as a symbol. Play the human being who contains it.

This is one of the clearest longitudinal developments in the entire archive.

A Useful Comparison with 2022

The following year, in Gazete Oksijen, İşler will again talk about audience attraction to dark characters.

The headline will summarize it provocatively:

“Seyirci kötüyü seviyor, ben bunun canlı kanıtıyım.”

That interview should be read directly after this one.

Episode explains the acting technique.

Oksijen asks what happens when the audience begins loving the result.

Why This Interview Matters

The Episode interview is one of the strongest records of Nejat İşler’s professional philosophy.

Its most important statement is:

“Kötüyü kötü oynamıyorum.”

That sentence connects Barda, Ercüment Çözer and many of the morally ambiguous characters that made İşler culturally distinctive.

It also reveals a wider pattern.

İşler distrusts simple categories not only in public life but inside acting itself.

Villain.

Hero.

Television.

Cinema.

The 1990s.

Outsider.

None is allowed to remain one-dimensional.

The interview also resolves an important question in his career chronology.

His rejection of television was never absolute.

When digital production offered finite seasons, preparation time and more humane working conditions, he returned.

The medium was not the enemy.

Loss of control was.