What Is a Forsyte?

Clip: Season 1 | 2m 17sVideo has Closed Captions

What is a Forsyte? The cast explore how their characters would define the family name.

What is a Forsyte? The cast explore how their characters would define the formidable family name, as well as their roles and responsibilities as Forsytes.

03/29/2026

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Funding for MASTERPIECE is provided by Viking and Raymond James with additional support from public television viewers and contributors to The MASTERPIECE Trust, created to help ensure the series’ future.

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(mellow music) - What is a Forsyte?

What defines this family?

- To be a Forsyte for Jolyon Sr means carrying on a tradition of success and standing within society that his whole family are dependent upon and dependent upon him to be at the forefront.

- The thing you have to remember about the Forsytes is they're not aristocrats.

A couple of generations before, they weren't anything.

They're arriviste social climbers who buy nice stuff.

It's all quite new and it's all quite fragile.

So I think that being a Forsyte means to be rich and powerful in a certain way, but in a way that can go away very quickly.

- I think Soames regards being a Forsyte as both a blessing and a bit of a curse.

He's quite happy being wealthy and influential, but I don't think he really gives it too much thought.

I don't think he buys into his own hype.

He's there on merit.

- My stepmother says I'm utterly unfit for decent society.

- Your crime?

- Different people tell her different things on what it is to be a Forsyte.

And every time she kind of hears that it kind of goes through her, 'cause she doesn't really want to be anything.

She doesn't wanna be tied down.

She doesn't wanna be controlled.

She doesn't really wanna fit a category or a family that isn't her own.

But I can only start as I mean to go on by doing what feels right.

- Ah, Forsyte.

- In his head, it's a very big responsibility, which I think he doesn't think he can do.

He essentially wants to step up.

He wants to be the man that his father knows he can be, but at the same time, there's a lot of self-doubt, because he secretly wants to be something else.

It's just that constant battle of head and heart.

- I thought your scrawling days were long gone.

- I have a plan.

I think Frances is very proud of being a Forsyte.

She is proud of that name.

She's proud of what she has brought to that family.

And I think that she has invested so much in her relationship with Jolyon, with the family, in her daughter, and also in the company that she'll stop at nothing to protect everything that she's created.