Skip To Content

    18 Gasp-Worthy Secrets About "Downton Abbey" Season 5 From The Cast

    Michelle Dockery, Allen Leech, Laura Carmichael, and Joanne Froggatt share details about the new season with BuzzFeed. Warning: SPOILERS ahead if you haven't finished Season 4.

    1. Reinvention is very big this season.

    2. But that doesn't mean Lady Mary will be choosing a new husband any time soon.

    3. Evelyn Napier (Brendan Patricks), however, is far out of the running.

    4. Anna (Joanne Froggatt) and Bates (Brendan Coyle) are still trying to find their way back together.

    5. Mary, meanwhile, will potentially be haunted by the action she took at the end of last season.

    6. Mary and Tom Branson (Allen Leech) grow closer.

    "What I love about Season 5 is the fact that that friendship that you see the beginnings of between Mary and Tom really comes into fruition," Leech told BuzzFeed. "They really become confidantes for each other in Season 5, and it's very much as brother-in-law and sister-in-law, but it goes beyond that. It starts as that, and it becomes a proper friendship... I think Tom's clever enough never to get involved in relation to a romantic life. He very much keeps it as much as he can in relation to her asking for advice and vice versa, he'd never put his foot in it."

    Dockery agreed. "They're much closer," she said. "It's funny looking back, how she felt about Branson to begin with, with Sybil and Branson and how she wasn't for that relationship, and now they've become very, very close. There's a similarity in what they went through, having lost a partner, so they spend quite a lot of time together on the estate and they've become each other's confidante, which is something you never would have imagined in Season 1 — that Mary would be confiding in the chauffeur."

    7. Russian refugees will descend on Downton.

    8. Edith has hidden her illegitimate daughter on the estate, but that doesn't mean that things will play out any easier with the child nearby.

    9. But Mary isn't going to do Edith like Edith did her.

    As in, she's not going to out Edith's secret the way that Edith nearly destroyed Mary's reputation by contacting the Turkish ambassador way back in Season 1.

    "I think they've gone beyond that," said Dockery. "I don't think Mary's out to get one over Edith — she gets a little impatient with Edith when she's down and she's obviously got something going on, and Mary doesn't really know what it is. She gets very impatient with her, because Mary's very much a get-up-and-go sort of person ... and with Edith, she just finds it a little bit irritating that she's not happy."

    Likewise, Carmichael said there hasn't been a rapprochement between the two Crawley sisters. "It's still pretty frosty, to be honest," said Carmichael of Mary and Edith's relationship. "The lucky thing for Edith is that Mary doesn't know right now, so who knows what she would do with that information. I can't really tell you any more without giving it away. It's interesting."

    10. Likewise, the father-daughter relationship between Mary and Robert (Hugh Bonneville) remains complicated.

    11. The mystery surrounding the presumed death of Michael Gregson (Charles Edwards) will continue into Season 5.

    12. Lady Rosamund (Samantha Bond) is a thorn in Edith's side. (And so too, potentially, is Violet.)

    13. Ultimately, Season 5 is about "motherhood" for Edith.

    14. And yet, there's the hope of some sort of bond forming between Edith and Tom.

    15. But it's not romantic, because that local schoolteacher — Sarah Bunting (Daisy Lewis) — is back as a love interest for Tom.

    16. But there's tension between Branson and the servants at Downton.

    17. Something is going on between Carson (Jim Carter) and Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan), who took each other's hand at the end of Season 4.

    18. The opening episode of Season 5 may or may not make you cry.

    But nothing sad ever happens on Downton! Oh, wait.

    Something sad ALWAYS happens on Downton. You've been warned.

    Season 5 of Downton Abbey premieres this autumn on ITV in the U.K. and on Jan. 4, 2015, on PBS' Masterpiece in the U.S.