10 Great Harry Potter Characters That We Never Got To See On Screen

Who will forever exist only in the books?

Harry Potter Peeves
Warner Bros.

The Harry Potter franchise celebrated it's twentieth birthday last year. J.K. Rowling's creation is now worth an estimated $25 billion and its value shows no signs of slowing, even though it has now been eleven years since the last book and seven years since the film adaptation of it was released.

It lives on through the stage, theme parks, the Fantastic Beasts spin-off film series, the Warner Bros studio tour and licensed merchandise in every conceivable form. Almost everybody that was part of the generation that grew up along with the series has some form of emotional attachment to it, passing their love onto subsequent generations.

Despite the special place they hold in people's hearts, it's not remotely controversial to point out that the films are an absolute mess in places, particularly in hindsight.

The use of four different directors with their own stylistic ideas, multiple (and not even similar) locations for important places such as Hogwarts and the streamlining of subplots and characters from the larger tomes combine to make a somewhat disjointed (but still nevertheless enjoyable) affair.

And unfortunately, that streamlining had some pretty big casualties in terms of those who were left out entirely...

10. Various Death Eaters

Harry Potter Peeves
Warner Bros.

Pretty much all of Voldemort's followers not named Lucius Malfoy or Bellatrix Lestrange were underused on screen, with the majority of Death Eaters simply played by extras in hoods.

Some were given occasional moments of prominence in the last few films - Peter Mullan as Yaxley for instance, whilst a few others (Richard Trimble as Augustus Rookwood, Tav McDougall as Travers and Peter Best as Macnair) were named in the credits as having appeared, just without being accompanied by the moments that defined their characters on the page (Rookwood's status as a ministry turncoat and his killing of Fred Weasley that enables Percy to get some redemption for turning his back on his family, for example).

Rowling wrote most of the Death Eaters as one dimensional followers with little motivation apart from being evil for the sake of it, which didn't give the film's screenwriters much to work with. Nevertheless, it would've been good to see an extended rogues gallery.

Avery's status as the bumbling idiot that always gets tortured for his failings would've been a great comedic cameo for somebody like Eddie Marsan, whilst Rodolphus Lestrange could've been featured to hammer home the point that his wife was practically married to Voldemort instead of him. He could've even been tragically shown to be powerless to do anything about it, in a deviation from the blank slate his character was in the books.

Contributor
Contributor

Alex was about to write a short biography, but he got distracted by something shiny instead.