‘Downton Abbey’ season 3 spoilers: The latest via Dan Stevens, Hugh Bonneville

Earlier in the day, we reported that a pair of “Downton Abbey” cast members in Hugh Bonneville and Joanna Frogatt were going to be stopping by the Apple Store in London in order to meet with some fans and talk a bit about the show. Based on what we hear, it turned out to be a lively and rather fun appearance accented even more by the fact that Bonneville was sporting a rather manly beard courtesy of a role as a tramp that he is playing in an upcoming project.

For those of you who are major spoiler-hunters, there really was not much here to talk about given that the cast members are under a pretty harsh order not to spoil anything unless they want to end up locked in Bates’ old cell (kidding). However, there was confirmation yet again that we will be seeing a Christmas episode, and that we are also going to probably never see Violet actually go downstairs and communicate in that world. (Then again, can you really be surprised by this?)

We’re going to start off some of our photo previews for episode 7 on Wednesday, but we wanted to share here something rather interesting in a recent Twitter post from Dan Stevens possibly concerning the talk that he may not be coming back to the show. Is it possible that this is just coincidental? Sure, but Stevens is a pretty smart guy, so we figure he knew what he was doing:

“‘If you don’t read the newspapers you are uninformed. If you do read the newspapers you are misinformed.’ ~ Mark Twain”

Our translation of this? Don’t count Matthew Crawley out just yet. Even though the actor is in New York at the moment on Broadway, this is only believed to be a limited run.