The Forsytes Season 2: The Cast & Creator Tease What's Ahead
The Forsytes ratcheted up the secrets, the passions, and the high-stakes drama in the Season 1 finale, leaving viewers in shocked suspense about what’s to come in Season 2. We spoke with The Forsyte’s cast and creator for teases and revelations about what might lie ahead in the show’s hotly anticipated second season! [Note: Contains Season 1 finale (Episode 6) spoilers]
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Secrets & Skeletons
Writer Debbie Horsfield revealed an absolute can’t-miss season to come when she described what’s ahead: “Where we leave it at the end of Season 1 is with some potential family secrets which are about to explode—it's like we've identified there's a hand grenade there, and it's about to be lobbed into Season 2. And like all family sagas, there are always secrets, there are always skeletons in closets, and they're about to come tumbling out.”
Soames and Irene
In the Season 1 finale of The Forsytes, we leave Irene with her devastating realization that she is utterly trapped with Soames. Millie Gibson [Irene] described the experience of wanting to urge Irene to leave her husband. “Whenever I'm getting frustrated and just want to shake Irene—and I think a lot of audience members will feel the same as me, like, ‘Why hasn't she left him?’—I remember those times on set when Jack Davenport would say, ‘Millie, take your 2026 head off and put your 1800s head on. For women, it was not that easy.’
It certainly wasn’t, agreed The Forsytes writer Debbie Horsfield, who explained that Irene, as a woman in society of that era, had no agency, no real rights of her own. “So it then becomes about, How does she deal with that, and what power does she have to navigate it?”
“In Season 2,” Gibson shared, “Irene’s basically just trying her best to make her marriage work and be a dutiful hostess. Phil [Bosinney, June’s fiance] and Irene become a bit more acquainted. He sees her for what she is, an artist, and he is an artist too, and he knows that Soames doesn't see her in that way, or if he does, it terrifies him. So she will find a kindred spirit in him as she's trying to navigate a marriage that she's now realized she will be stuck in.”
Jolyon and Frances and Louisa
Checking in with The Forsytes’ Tuppence Middleton [Frances] and Eleanor Tomlinson [Louisa] revealed very different prospects ahead for their respective characters in Season 2. While Middleton described those final moments of Season 1 as “a bit of a blow” for Frances, who had spent all of the first season “thinking about what's best for her daughter, her husband, and her family, and putting everything she has into trying to save and protect that,” Tomlinson described Louisa as having “finally got her man back, and they have this promised life together and the excitement of that. He's left the family for her to have his own family, and it's all she's ever wanted.”
Now that Jo has left Frances and the Forsyte firm and family, what will it mean for his wife? Tuppence Middleton teased a future with tantalizing unknowns. “In Season 2, she has to focus on herself for once, thinking about what do I want? Where do I stand in this world? What do I want from my life? And is there another path? Is there love again in my future? And is that with the person that I thought I was going to be with, or is that someone totally new?”
Eleanor Tomlinson’s teaser of Louisa’s Season 2 future also highlights dramatic uncertainties, asking, “How will Jo’s leaving affect the Forsytes' plan, and how will that affect the most powerful family around at that time, and where will that leave her? Him having been exiled from the family, what does that look like in reality, without his money and without his connections? They're living in very happy squalor, but that could come with a price.”
Jolyon Sr. and James and the Mysterious “Alexandra”
When talking about Season 2, Stephen Moyer [Jolyon Sr.] emphasized that the show is not a carbon copy adaptation of Galsworthy’s books, so they are not a reliable guide for those seeking insights into future seasons. “This is Debbie Horsfield…creating her version, which is why it's called The Forsytes and not The Forsyte Saga.” With that, he shared an enticingly vague tease for the longtime widower who seemingly has only focused on his family and his work. “There’s a really nice moment where June says to him, ‘I’m sad for you, grandpa, that you’ve never known great passion,’ and my character says something along the lines of, ’How would you know what I do when you don't see it?’ And even though it was a beat as small as that, what I thanked Debbie for was giving a sort of funnel out to a world that nobody knows about—a possibility that he’s been hiding something from everybody for his entire life.”
Jack Davenport [James Forsyte] got a little more specific about said “great passion”when he revealed, “There are allusions made towards the end of Season 1 to a woman called Alexandra, who clearly both of us have had a romantic entanglement with—possibly back to back, maybe simultaneously— just all a bit unclear.” How will that play out for the rivaling brothers? Davenport mused, “James is very quick to have a sack for the moral high ground at any opportunity, and he's going to find that the air is thin up there pretty soon.”
Watch a Teaser for The Forsytes Season 2!
