‘Women to Watch: Women Who Make a Difference’ ceremony was held at Swissotel The Bosphorus, Istanbul.
…and a lot of hard work. Gülse Birsel worked so hard that she had to undergo a physical therapy. Although the four phenomena listed above helped shape her career, the successful writer believes that sometimes listening to instincts is better.
Gülse Birsel, Writer – Screenwriter – Actress
The average Turkish viewer could list many shows that have suddenly become rating champions, yet one would name only a bunch of comedy shows. Gülse Birsel is the creator of two of those comedy shows: following Avrupa Yakası, the show that made Turkish television history with 190 episodes over 5.5 years, Yalan Dünya, which started in early 2012, has already proven itself a worthy successor with the buzz it has created.
Birsel acts in both. Her success has put her on advertisers’ radars, and consequently both she and the characters she created are the face of many brands.
“I try to contribute, even a little, to commercial scripts in which these characters appear so that the script reflects the characters’ language. Once a script for a commercial is complete, the agency sends it to me and I revise it so that the dialogue and script fit the character and the character doesn’t deviate from the show. This is how I entered the advertising world, and now I can’t get out,” Birsel says. Given her career, she’s actually not that far from the world of advertising.
Birsel oversees magazines that are important in their fields and continues to write for Sabah newspaper. One night, while working late, she answered the phone and found herself on TV, both writing the scripts for and presenting on the advertising show GAG.
Describing that night, Birsel says, “According to what the GAG team told me, they had seven or eight different names in mind. Once they found my extension, they called me. They said, ‘If you didn’t answer, we were probably not going to call you again.’ I got into television thanks to that phone call.” Naturally, this anecdote is one of the turning points in Birsel’s career.
There are two critical decisions that Birsel says formed her career: The first was to make Yalan Dünya, and the second was to continue making Avrupa Yakası after Ata Demirer, Bülent Polat and Evrim Akın left the show. “Since I started out as a nobody on Avrupa Yakası as well as on the other projects I took part in, I had that much less to lose. But after Avrupa Yakası was a legend for six years, they told me it took a lot of courage to make another sitcom. Still, I did it with some ignorant courage, and thank God it turned out great.
After three actors left Avrupa Yakası, we thought a lot and asked ourselves, ‘Should we finish it off? The leads are gone; the funniest characters are gone.’ But I said, ‘I like doing this, we could keep going’, thus making another emotional ‘onward’ decision, and the show went on for three more years. I don’t know if this constitutes taking risks, but sometimes making intuitive decisions and acting on instinct can lead to better results.”
“After three actors left Avrupa Yakası, we decided to go onward, and the show went on for three more years. I don’t know if this constitutes taking risks, but sometimes making intuitive decisions and acting on instinct can lead to better results.”
