[3][4] In 2001–2002, over a period of six months,[5] Kekilli appeared in a number of pornographic films for various directors including Josef Baumberger[6] and Harry S.

[11] Shortly after the release of Head-On, the German tabloid newspaper Bild made public Kekilli's earlier work in pornography.

During the televised acceptance speech, she tearfully complained that she was being subject to a "dreckige Hetzkampagne" ("dirty smear campaign") and "Medienvergewaltigung" ("media rape").

[14] Kekilli starred in the Turkish coup d'état film Home Coming (Eve Dönüş) (2006), playing the wife of a man who was unjustly imprisoned and tortured.

Also that year, she played a Jewish woman on the way to the Auschwitz concentration camp in the 2006 film The Last Train (German: Der letzte Zug).

[15] In 2010, Kekilli was cast as Shae in HBO's Game of Thrones, an adaptation of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels.

[2] In 2017, Kekilli blocked her Instagram account from being accessed in Turkey, saying that users from that country had sent a multitude of abusive and threatening messages.

In December 2006, at an anti-domestic violence event run by the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet in Berlin, she stated, in German, the equivalent of "I have experienced for myself that both physical and psychological abuse are regarded as normal in a Muslim family.