10 Times Actors Were Edited Out Of Movies

4. Rik Mayall - Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone

Rik Mayall Peeves
Warner Bros. Pictures

It's borderline impossible to fit every element of a novel into its film adaptation, as the Harry Potter series found out.

Various parts of the books were cut from their movie versions, including SPEW, Nearly Headless Nick's deathday party, and the sphinx in the maze, but one of the most notable omissions was Peeves the poltergeist, who is nowhere to be seen in the entire franchise.

Peeves is hardly an essential part of the Harry Potter story, but he gives Hogwarts Castle a bit more personality, and has many fun appearances throughout the book series. Initially, he was supposed to appear throughout the movie series too, a recurring character played by comedian Rik Mayall, but his scenes in the first film were cut because the filmmakers weren't happy with the look of the character.

Mayall hilariously recalled his time on the Harry Potter set in an interview conducted a few years before his death, where he revealed that he did around three weeks of filming, but kept getting sent off the set because he was making everyone else laugh.

(NSFW warning: the following clip is very sweary).

He also sent his kids to see the film without telling them he wasn't actually in it, and they came out thinking he had played Hagrid. Somehow.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!