“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.'”