Hakan Karsak

Hakan Karsak — Biography

Hakan Karsak is an actor who came up through the stage; he reached a wide audience as Temel Kalkandere, known as Enişte, in ATV's Eşkıya Dünyaya Hükümdar Olmaz. He later played Hacı in Mahkum and Emin in ATV's Aile Saadeti, and appeared in the 2026 film Aldığımız Nefes.

He first met the theatre in 1992 as an amateur with the Ankara Youth Theatre and the Yahya Kemal Beyatlı High School theatre group, then joined the Ankara Art Theatre's acting workshop as a trainee. His formal education lay outside the stage: he studied construction at Afyon Kocatepe University and philosophy at Istanbul University. After the 1999 Düzce earthquake he worked with UNICEF for two years as a theatre instructor for affected children and young people in Düzce. At the Diyarbakır City Theatre he appeared in plays including Lysistrata, Dullar and Özgürlüğün Bedeli.

On the big screen came Min Dît (2009), Press and Ay Lav Yu (2010), then Muska, Kumun Tadı and Consequences (2014) and Sarmaşık (2015); in 2013 he won Best Actor at the Bosphorus International Film Festival. On television, after Firar, Sultan and Vicdan, he played Basri in Benim Adım Gültepe. He played an imam in Kelebekler (2018) and Nevzat in Veda Mektubu (2023).