Ufuk Bayraktar

Ufuk Bayraktar — Biography

The son of Cevahir Bayraktar, from Trabzon, and Şenel Hanım, from Kilis, Ufuk Bayraktar was born in Istanbul on 12 September 1981 and has an older brother and a younger sister. After finishing high school at Gürsoy College he chose not to attend university and went to work at his father's Firuzağa coffeehouse in Cihangir, where director Zeki Demirkubuz discovered him in 2003. He appeared in Demirkubuz's Bekleme Odası (2003) and Kader (2006), the latter earning him Best Actor at the 26th Istanbul Film Festival. Roles followed in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's İklimler, Semih Kaplanoğlu's Yumurta and Feo Aladağ's German production Ayrılık, before he became widely recognized for portraying a younger Ramiz Dayı, the character Tuncel Kurtiz played, in Ezel (2009-2011). Beyond military and historical productions such as the Dağ series, Çanakkale 1915 and Vatanım Sensin, and the film Kümes (2014), which he wrote and directed, he later joined the Dayı: Bir Adamın Hikâyesi trilogy from 2020 and appeared in Güven Bana and Benim Babam Bir Kahraman (2023). He is married to Merve Bayraktar and has a son, Efe Cevahir. A 2018 brawl involving an unlicensed pistol ended in a six-month prison term, and in 2020 a court convicted him of hitting a woman with a thrown bottle and cutting a teenage boy with a blade, imposing four years and five months. Facing up to eleven years in a 2025 case accusing him of extorting a shop owner, he tearfully told the court he had punched a man while drunk and apologized; the man dropped the complaint and the case was ultimately dismissed in 2026.