Inside a seminar room at the University of Kent's Canterbury campus, a group of students sat quietly around a table - completely unaware they were rubbing shoulders with a film star.

Each had been asked to undergo the awkward ritual of introducing themselves to the rest of the class. So up they stood, shoulders sloping as they muttered a few words.

Their rushed introductions were met with silence, only broken by the creaking of their chairs as they slumped back into their seats.

Then rose a petite 23-year-old. “I’m Farah, and I’m really famous in Turkey,” she uttered.

When she returned to her seat the class was brought to life by the tapping of keyboards and phones, as her fellow students Googled her name.

“We were asked to say something interesting about ourselves,” she remembers.

“I didn’t know how to put it, so when it was my turn, I was really shy and I wasn’t facing anyone. All the people in the class were saying ‘What?’ and started Googling me.”

Just a few months before, Farah Zeynep Abdullah was battling sleep deprivation as she worked 22-hour shifts in Istanbul, recalling hastily memorised lines in front of a trio of cameras. During those feverish days between 2010 and 2012, she filmed 79 three-hour episodes of Öyle Bir Geçer Zaman ki (Time Goes by so Quickly).

“They didn’t have regulations back then,” Farah says, bluntly. “I remember hallucinating. You’re like a robot; I was just learning my lines, working and not being able to sleep.

“You can’t expect someone to work 22 hours and expect them to go home at 5am before being picked up at 7am again – it wasn’t humane. I said later on to the director that it was horrible. I would never like to go back to that.”

Farah was cast in the drama while she was studying French and drama at the University of Kent. It came after an acquaintance working for broadcaster Kanal D recommended her for the role after learning the series’ director was searching for a girl who was "innocent and sexy”.

“She showed the director a photo of me from Facebook, and the director said, ‘This is what I'm looking for’.

"I was in Istanbul for the Easter holidays and she rang me up and said, ‘What do you think about acting in a TV series?’

"I thought it would be an experience. It all started like that; it was weird.”

Having only performed in English plays, Farah upped sticks to the Turkish capital after securing permission from the university to take a gap year. The programme, later dubbed into more than 30 languages, proved to be a hit in Turkey, earning her overnight fame and the attention of the country’s paparazzi.

Before returning to Canterbury to complete her degree, Farah also shot The Butterfly’s Dream, which was trumpeted as Turkey’s most expensive film production to date. The glossy romance was selected as the country's entry for the Oscars' 2013 foreign-language category.

“While they were premiering it and at parties in Hollywood, I was in lectures. I was being nominated and getting awards, but I was a student,” Farah, now 30, remarks.

“I lived on my own in a studio apartment in Wincheap for the rest of uni. I wanted to be alone after I had such a busy life in Turkey. I needed that at that moment.

"Back here I worked insanely on the show. I was in a bad shape. It made me realise how much I missed uni – I missed studying, I missed essays. I loved Kent.

“In England, I was really relaxed and I could just wear and say whatever I wanted. You can’t do this here – I can’t go anywhere in my pyjamas here.

"It’s a bit because of fame, but it’s also because of the culture. It’s a bit too male dominant and religious. People feel like they have a say in your lifestyle.”

Perched on the edge of my sofa, I’m speaking to Farah through a laptop screen. Wearing a pink t-shirt and a broad smile, the Turkish A-lister, who has more than a million followers on Instagram, is in her living room more than 2,000 miles away with one of her dogs, Eylül.

Speaking with an English accent, coupled with occasional Turkish inflexions, she reminisces about living on campus in Tyler Court, nights out at The Venue and Cuban and shopping trips to Asda in Sturry Road.

“Five of us used to get a taxi and go there for our groceries,” she says, leaning back into her seat.

“I miss the campus so much. I loved the lectures. I still have photos from freshers. We used to dress up a lot, drink a lot of Smirnoff and I used to love Rutherford College’s hamburgers.

“I was never that far away from drama and theatre. I was in a play called Closer and we performed it at the Gulbenkian. We sold tickets to it – that was the first time I did that.

"People loved it, but we didn’t make it to Edinburgh Fringe – the jury was there, but they didn’t choose us.”

Forced to remain indoors because of lockdown in Turkey, the celebrity has been cleaning, binge-watching Netflix and enjoying the company of her pets.

Her career has been put on hold, with shooting delayed for an upcoming film delayed until September. But she also yearns to be able to return to the UK.

“My family’s in Maidenhead and I moved there before sixth form,” she explains.

“I couldn’t get back to England because of the virus, so I’m kind of stuck here. I really miss home.”

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