The 6 Most Important Harry Potter Characters Cut From The Movies

I get it. Adaptations are hard. Turning a hit book into a movie is tricky, especially when the books in question — in this case, the "Harry Potter" series — are very, very long. The longest "Potter" book, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," contains a whopping 870 pages in its US hardcover edition, so obviously not every single detail is bound to make it during the adaptation process. Still, the "Harry Potter" film franchise, which spanned eight movies (breaking the final book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," into two parts), left a lot behind, and some of it is pretty important!

There are actually a whole bunch of "Harry Potter" plotlines and characters that didn't make it from the books to the movies, but here I'm going to try and note some of the most important ones. (Unfortunately, that takes some out of the running, so apologies to Ted and Andromeda Tonks, Teddy Lupin, Marietta Edgecombe, Professor Binns, and the rest.) 

As Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) learn magic at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, they meet a lot of people. Here are the biggest characters from the books who do not appear in the films.

"Harry Potter" first introduces the Weasleys after Harry and Ron choose the same compartment on the Hogwarts Express as they travel to school for the very first time, and eventually Harry meets all of Ron's close relatives. Patriarch Arthur Weasley (Mark Williams) is good-natured, kindly, and easily distracted by Muggle trinkets, his wife Molly (Julie Walters) rules the house with an iron yet affectionate fist, and Ron would be the baby of the family if it weren't for his younger sister Ginny (Bonnie Wright). We know Ron's twin brothers Fred and George (James and Oliver Phelps) pretty well, as well as his uptight brother Percy (Chris Rankin), and the eldest Weasley brother, Bill (Domhnall Gleeson). Incredibly, though, the movies leave an entire sibling, Charlie Weasley, on the cutting room floor.

The wildest part about Charlie not making it into the movies is that he appears in the books not once, but twice. In the first book, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" (or "Philosopher's Stone," depending on where you live in the world), Harry, Ron, and Hermione realize that their friend, Hogwarts groundskeeper Rubeus Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane), is keeping an illegal dragon egg in his home — and when it hatches into a baby dragon as eggs are wont to do, the problem only becomes more dire. In the dead of night, Charlie, a dragon trainer, flies to Hogwarts from Romania and takes the dragon, whom Hagrid christened Norbert, away safely. Later, in the fourth book, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," Charlie reappears during the Triwizard Tournament because the first task features dragons, so naturally, he's there for work. Again, adaptations are tough, but leaving Charlie Weasley out of the movies feels like a big omission.

Perhaps the only character to appear in every single "Harry Potter" book but none of the movies is Peeves the Poltergeist, Hogwarts' resident ghostly troublemaker. Peeves is, to put it lightly, a menace, constantly knocking over suits of armor, popping through paintings, and just generally causing chaos — much to the chagrin of the castle's cantankerous caretaker Argus Filch (David Bradley), who is constantly cleaning up Peeves' mess. Throughout the books, Peeves is both a nuisance to Harry, Ron, and Hermione and a useful scapegoat. Whenever Peeves is distracting Filch, it gives the main trio an opening to sneak around the castle and solve various mysteries.

Here's something funny, though: the "Harry Potter" movies went to the trouble of casting Peeves and then just cut him out of the movies. Rik Mayall, the British comedian who passed away in 2014, was chosen to play Peeves and even filmed some scenes. In2022, Chris Columbus, who directed the first two "Harry Potter" movies, said that Warner Bros., the studio behind the "Harry Potter" films, has a three-hour cut of "Sorcerer's Stone" that does include Peeves. When The Wrap told Columbus they'd like to see that cut, he enthusiastically said he would too: "We have to put Peeves back in the movie!" As of this writing, there's still no sign of the Peeves Cut of "Harry Potter," but fans can hold out hope.

House-elves are ... a strange thing in the "Harry Potter" books. Only two appear in the movies: Dobby (voiced by Toby Jones) and Kreacher (voiced by Timothy Bateson in "Order of the Phoenix" and Simon McBurney in "The Deathly Hallows"). In the books, the rest are sort of a non-entity, with a large cohort of them quietly working in the kitchens at Hogwarts. When Hermione learns this in "Goblet of Fire," she's incensed that the unpaid elves are the ones providing all of the school's food, but this is hand-waved away by other major characters who tell her that, actually, the elves like doing their unpaid work, so she should stop it. (Obviously, the underlying throughline here being "slavery is good because the slaves love it" is not great, and I should say that it's one of the more troubling aspects of the entire franchise that Hermione is viewed as a ridiculous complainer for fighting for the rights of the elves.)

The only other named house-elf we meet in the books is Winky, a female house-elf in the employ of Bartemius Crouch Sr. (played in the films by Roger Lloyd Pack). The gang meets her at the Quidditch World Cup in "Goblet of Fire," and Hermione immediately clocks that Crouch Sr., a Ministry official and Percy's boss, is forcing Winky to go up in the stands even though she's terrified of heights. When an unknown person sends the Dark Mark — the mark of Ralph Fiennes' Voldemort — into the night sky after the match, Winky is found with the wand that did it and summarily fired by Crouch Sr. (we eventually learn that she was accompanying Crouch Sr.'s fugitive son Barty Crouch Jr., played in "Goblet of Fire" by David Tennant, to the match and lost track of him, at which point he cast the Dark Mark). Winky ends up working at Hogwarts alongside Dobby, but she's miserable as a free elf and ends up becoming, basically, a house-elf alcoholic (butterbeer affects them like regular alcohol, and she's throwing bottles back when the trio reunites with her). Honestly, the Winky story is really dark. I sort of get why they left this one out.

Speaking of the Quidditch World Cup, another important figure that Harry, Ron, and Hermione come across during the festivities is Ludo Bagman, a rather unserious man who heads up the Department of Magical Games and Sports at the Ministry of Magic. Bagman, who serves as the announcer for the World Cup, immediately takes a bet from Fred and George, who wager that Ireland will win the overall match but that Viktor Krum, the superstar Bulgarian player portrayed by Stanislav Yanevski in the movies, will be the one to catch the game-ending Snitch. Bagman takes their bet and all of their money but is nowhere to be found when Fred and George prove to be exactly correct, and they spend the better part of the book trying to track him down to get their rightful winnings.

Bagman reappears throughout the book, looking increasingly disheveled according to Harry's point of view, and also makes a point of illegally offering to help Harry win the Triwizard Tournament (Harry, the second Hogwarts champion, shouldn't even be competing in the first place, but that's another story). As it turns out, Bagman put all of his own money on Harry winning the tournament outright, and when Harry decides to share the cup with Cedric Diggory (Robert Pattinson), the other Hogwarts champion, only for Cedric to be murdered as Voldemort returns, Bagman goes on the run to escape a gang of goblins who want their money back. Bagman is fairly important in the book — especially because Harry gives his Triwizard winnings to Fred and George after the tournament, allowing them to open their joke shop in Diagon Alley, which was their plan for their World Cup money — but I do get why he didn't make the cut.

Throughout the sixth "Harry Potter" book, subtitled "Half-Blood Prince," Harry takes secret evening lessons with Hogwarts headmaster and formidable wizard Albus Dumbledore (played in the films by both Richard Harris and Michael Gambon) as the two try to discover what Voldemort's gameplan really was all along. Eventually, they discover that the Dark Lord has split his soul a whopping seven times to basically ensure immortality and hidden those bits of soul in various important objects around the wizarding world, which is, obviously, not great. The way the two discern this, though, is through multiple memories Dumbledore and Harry collect from people who knew Voldemort, and only two of these extremely important memories make it into the movies.

One that's left out is actually from before Voldemort himself is even born, and that memory concerns the Gaunt family, who don't appear in the movies at all — so if you haven't read the books, let me break this down for you. Not far from the village of Little Hangleton, the home of Voldemort's wealthy and handsome Muggle father Tom Riddle, you can find the Gaunt family's rundown home, where patriarch Marvolo and his children Merope and Morfin live. Thanks to a memory from a Ministry official investigating the Gaunts for misuse of magic, Harry and Dumbledore learn some key facts. Not only are the Gaunts descended from Salazar Slytherin, an original (and evil) Hogwarts founder, but he possesses two items that go on to become Horcruxes: a locket that once belonged to Slytherin and a ring that grievously injuries Dumbledore and turns out to be home to the Resurrection Stone, one of the Deathly Hallows. 

The other important thing about the Gaunts is that Merope is in love with the young Tom Riddle and ends up brewing a love potion to ensnare him. She weans him off it after she gets pregnant, hoping he'll still love her without it, but instead he leaves her. A desperate and heartbroken Merope gives birth to a baby boy on the doorsteps of an orphanage. That baby, also named Tom Riddle, grows up to become Voldemort. Yes, this memory would have been a departure in the movie, but it does provide very crucial Voldemort lore, so it's a shame that it was cut.

One of the saddest backstories in the entire "Harry Potter" franchise actually belongs to one of Harry's classmates: Neville Longbottom, a forgetful but bright boy played by Matthew Lewis in the movies. We learn, early in the "Harry Potter" books, that Neville was raised by his grandmother Augusta, a stern and imperious woman who is constantly disappointed that her grandson isn't living up to his father's legacy. But wait — what happened to Neville's parents?

We find out in the book version of "Order of the Phoenix" that Neville's parents were also attacked by Voldemort and his followers — like Harry's parents, who were murdered by the Dark Lord himself — but they met a different fate. While visiting an injured Arthur Weasley at St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny run into Neville, who's there seeing his parents for Christmas, accompanied by Augusta. As Neville's grandmother reveals, Frank and Alice Longbottom were tortured into insanity by Voldemort's Death Eaters — one of whom, Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter), Neville ends up fighting directly later in the story — and now live out their days at St. Mungo's. (A particularly gutting detail here is that Alice gives Neville the "gift" of an empty chewing gum wrapper and he tucks it into his pocket after Augusta urges him to throw it away.)

Obviously, Augusta, Frank, and Alice do not appear in the films (Frank and Alice are ever so briefly seen in an old photo in "Order of the Phoenix" but that doesn't count). It makes sense that this plotline was cut, but it's a really important detail where Neville is concerned, and once again, it's a shame that they weren't included.