Joshua Orpin Went From ‘Titans’ Superboy to Mustached Victorian Daddy

Written by Eugene
Eugene

Eugene is an Instinct Magazine's writer for everything LGBTQIA+, from the hottest celeb tea to the most pressing community news. With a sharp eye for detail and a love for keeping it real, Eugene serv...

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Published Sep 27, 2026

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Was Superboy in Titans your super gay awakening? Because Joshua Orpin has apparently decided that wasn’t enough. He’s daddy now.

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The Australian actor, best known to DC fans as Superboy in Titans, has traded the superhero suit for the considerably more buttoned-up world of The Forsytes. And by buttoned-up, we mean that quite literally: frock coats, immaculate tailoring, Victorian propriety—and a mustache that has no business being this effective.

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Orpin plays Soames Forsyte, a wealthy and ambitious solicitor whose meticulously controlled life starts to unravel when he becomes captivated by Irene, played by Millie Gibson. It’s a far cry from playing a genetically engineered superhero, but visually, we’re not exactly complaining about the career move.

If anything, Orpin has gone from superhuman to supernaturally hot.

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Meet Soames Forsyte: handsome, repressed, and absolutely not handling it well

The fun of Orpin’s Forsytes era isn’t simply that he looks fantastic in period clothes. It’s that Soames gives him something much more complicated to work with.

Orpin told MASTERPIECE that the character’s depth was a major part of the appeal, calling the “intricacies and the nuance and those gritty details” what make a character fun to play. He also sees Soames as someone whose ambition and pragmatism can sometimes override his consideration for the emotional consequences of his decisions.

 

Which is a very polite way of saying: this man has feelings and absolutely no idea what to do with them.

And that’s central to Soames. He’s accustomed to being in control—of his career, his family, his place in society and, increasingly, his relationship with Irene. Then Irene comes along and complicates everything.

Orpin describes Soames as someone who will identify people as obstacles to his ambitions and “target and go after those people,” admitting that the character’s more explosive moments were “a lot of fun to play.” We believe him.

There’s something particularly delicious about watching an actor known for playing a superhero lean into a character who is powerful in an entirely different way. Soames doesn’t need super strength. He has money, status, ambition and the confidence of a man who has spent his entire life believing he should get what he wants.

And when that confidence starts to crack? That’s when things get interesting.

Joshua Orpin’s Mustache Is Doing Overtime

Let’s not pretend the visuals aren’t a major attraction here. Orpin has somehow gone from Titans‘ youthful Superboy to a Victorian leading man who looks like he should be standing beside a fireplace, holding a brandy and refusing to discuss his emotions.

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The tailoring helps. The sideburns help. The mustache is, frankly, doing overtime.

But there’s also something about seeing an actor mature into a different kind of screen presence. Superboy had the obvious physical appeal of a superhero. Soames has something more restrained: the rigid posture, the formal clothes, the controlled expressions and the occasional flash of something much less controlled underneath.

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It’s less look at me, I’m a superhero and more I have just made an extremely consequential decision and would prefer that nobody question it. Both are effective.

And then you find out he’s a movie nerd with two cats

The contrast between Orpin’s intimidating screen presence and his life away from the set is particularly charming.

In his MASTERPIECE interview, he revealed that his love of movies goes all the way back to childhood, when his family owned several Video Ezy rental stores in Melbourne. He remembers wandering around the stores and picking movies simply because their covers caught his attention.

“I’d watch anything that I saw,” he recalled.

These days, his interests include movies, video games, comic books and board games. But his real obsession appears to be his two cats.

Orpin estimates that about 95 percent of his camera roll consists of pictures of one cat or the other. He even has an Instagram account dedicated to them.

Orpin
Source: joshua_orpin

So yes, the man playing the intensely controlled, ambitious Soames Forsyte is apparently also the kind of person who will interrupt whatever he’s doing to show someone what his cat is doing. That is useful information.

Superboy was only the beginning

There’s something satisfying about Orpin’s move from Titans to The Forsytes. He’s gone from a character whose appeal was largely physical and superheroic to one where the attraction is tangled up with personality, repression, ambition and the slow collapse of self-control. And somehow, he looks even better doing it.

 

So if you remember watching Titans and thinking, Oh, Joshua Orpin is very attractive, congratulations. You were right.

But The Forsytes is here to introduce a new complication: Joshua Orpin in a frock coat, with a mustache, playing a wealthy Victorian man whose emotional repression is steadily becoming someone else’s problem.

 

Superboy walked so Soames Forsyte could brood magnificently in period costume. And honestly? We’re very glad he made the trip.

 

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