Rüzgar Erkoçlar

Rüzgar Erkoçlar — Biography

Born Nil Erkoçlar, the actor came into the world on 26 March 1986 in Istanbul, appeared in commercials from the age of ten, and trained in film acting at TÜRVAK. A 2002 advertisement for the sanitary-pad brand Molped, which also featured Hülya Avşar, Tuba Büyüküstün, Hande Katipoğlu and Yasemin Özilhan, brought him nationwide recognition and led to television offers; he is remembered above all for playing Foto Fato in the 2005 series Emret Komutanım.

He went on to take parts in Elif, Üvey Aile, Hesaplaşma, Yamak Ahmet, Çakıl Taşları and Maskeli Balo, and appeared in a 2010 Türk Telekom advertisement with Cem Yılmaz, before coming out as a trans man in February 2013 and taking the name Rüzgar. That transition, and the struggles that followed it, became the subject of the award-winning 2022 documentary Blue ID; his brother, Görkem Batu Erkoçlar, is also transgender, and he married Tuğba Beyazoğlu in 2017.

When Erol Köse, one of the first Turkish public figures to speak openly about gender transition, died in March 2026, Erkoçlar marked the loss with an emotional post reflecting on his own fourteen years since coming out.