Janet Montgomery On ‘Salem,’ How The Show Is Feminist [EXCLUSIVE VIDEO]

Actress Janet Montgomery plays Mary Sibley on WGN America’s period drama Salem, which explores the Salem Witch Trials in the early days of America.

Janet Montgomery On ‘Salem’

Montgomery believes that Salem is worlds apart from some of its tawdry predecessors when it comes to tackling sorcery. Not only does Montgomery point to the violence in the series, but how it handles its female characters.

“It’s definitely not like a sort of cheesy witch show. […] It is very violent and a lot of the violence actually is through the women and that’s quite exciting,” Montgomery explained to uInterview in an exclusive interview. “I think the show is so different from any other witch show because the characters are really complicated. These women, you don’t know how to feel about them. That’s my favorite thing that I hear from any fan is that they don’t know whether they sympathize with Mary, or they like or they hate her.”

Going into greater death about the female roles in Salem, Montgomery admits that she does see the show as having feminist sensibilities. While the women in the show are involved romantically with their male counterparts, there’s a lot of drama that unfolds without the men, between the women.

“Especially this season, there’s not just Mary Sibley; there’s the Anne Hale story line, there’s Mercy, there’s Lucy Lawless – who’s joined the show – that you have all these great female characters all coming together,” said Montgomery. “So yeah, I do think that for other women watching the show there’s some empowerment in that. Whether you’re an actress or you work in an office, just to see more women on TV interacting with each other rather than just playing the girlfriend.”

Check Out uInterview’s Exclusive With ‘Salem’s Shane West

The Salem Witch Trials is a point in American history that is often explored through pop culture. Despite the abundance of material available about the trials, they are still a point of interest for many people. According to Montgomery, this is due in part to the way in which the psychology that inspired the hysteria still seems prevalent in today’s society.

“I think it was the sheer sort of like psychology of the way people acted and it still rings true today. There can be a mass hysteria from something that no one has seen or knows about. It happens with religion. There’s hysteria over God even though we’ve never seen him and I feel like witchcraft sort of plays into that,” Montgomery observed. “What brought that on, whether there was something bizarre that happened that made people think witches were true, whether people actually thought they were witches because of the way Puritans would have said that if you were a woman who enjoyed having sex or if had a certain mark on your leg then you were a witch. Maybe people actually did believe they were witches.”

Salem’s second season premiere aired April 5.