Elizabeth Montgomery's Favorite Role Wasn't Bewitched – It Was In The Twilight Zone
There are plenty of reasons to love "The Twilight Zone," but a fun one is the way it lets us see so many famous actors before they became household names. Before Carol Burnett had her own variety show, she starred in the 1962 episode "Cavender is Coming." Before Leonard Nimoy got to be in "Star Trek," he was a throwaway soldier in the 1961 episode "A Quality of Mercy." Then there's Elizabeth Montgomery, best known for her role in the 1960s sitcom "Bewitched." Before she played the good witch Samantha Stephens, however, she played a stoic, unnamed woman in the season 3 premiere of "The Twilight Zone."
The 1961 episode is called "Two," and it starts off with Montgomery's character wandering through an abandoned war-torn town. It's been years since the war ended, resulting in total destruction on both sides. When she meets a mysterious man with the opposing army's uniform (Charles Bronson), she has to deal with the realization that she and him are probably the only two people left. "There's no longer a reason for us to fight," The Man says. "There are no longer any armies. Only rags of various colors that were once uniforms."
Although it's The Man who gets 99% of the lines, it's Montgomery's character who serves as the protagonist. She has to grow from a war-hungry soldier to someone willing to embrace peace and love, even if it's with a man she was trained to kill. It's a character arc that serves as a perfect opportunity for Montgomery to show off her acting skills, as she gets to convey all this inner conflict while only speaking one word during the whole episode. (The word is "precrassny," Russian for "pretty," which she speaks while looking at a still-intact dress in an otherwise ravaged clothing store.)
Perhaps her best work
"Liz Montgomery, at the time, was so dedicated to her art," recalled Maurita Pittman, widow of "Twilight Zone" writer Montgomery Pittman, in the official Twilight Zone companion book. "Most girls want to look really pretty for the camera. Monty had to fight her, really, because she wanted to make her eyes really black. She got too much makeup on, she was making herself too haggard." The result is a version of Liz Montgomery that's borderline unrecognizable to fans of "Bewitched," even ignoring the character's drastically different personality.
The hardest part for Montgomery, meanwhile, was resisting the desire to overact. "You find it difficult not to exaggerate every look, every action," she said. "You think nobody will notice you unless you ham it up. You have to underplay every scene in a play of this type." It's easy to see how, when playing a dialogue-less role, it must be tempting to play your emotions as big and unambiguous as possible. Instead, she chose to keep her performance fairly grounded, even if it ran the risk of audiences not always understanding her behavior. Better to be subtle and potentially misunderstood, she reasoned, than to be obvious and boring.
It was a risk that paid off, with "Two" being one of the best-regarded episodes of the series. "No offense to Samantha Stephens, but this is by far the best work Montgomery ever did," wrote critic David Fear in a 2019 ranking of the series' best episodes. Montgomery herself considered the performance to be one of her best, even with all the challenges that came with playing a barely-talking character. As she remarked at the time, "I never enjoyed doing a show as much as I did 'Two.'"