4 Major Harry Potter Movie Characters Who Completely Disappeared (& Why)

In a franchise as big as Harry Potter, it’s only natural that some things become hard to keep track of. JK Rowling was notoriously poor at keeping a tight focus on her own timeline, and fans have spent decades picking apart lore contradictions and other problems. But it’s all part of the fun that makes creative titans feel a little more human. Less understandable is when movie franchises seemingly lose entire characters. In one film (or more, as is occasionally the case), they’re important figures, often crucial to the plot, and then a sequel rolls around and they’re never mentioned again, and nobody in-universe seems at all bothered that a key character has simply vanished.

Sometimes such examples happen when actors are unavailable, but the writers don’t want to offer a permanent solution (as they did when Will Smith’s Captain Hiller was unceremoniously killed off-screen between the Independence Day movies because he couldn’t return for the sequel). Other times real life gets in the way: tragedy occurs or medical reasons stop an actor’s involvement, and it’s simply not appropriate to acknowledge it. But those are good reasons, and wholly forgivable. In the Harry Potter movie franchise, though, several characters just cease to exist with absolutely no explanation given in the movies. And these four are probably the most prominent cases.

4) Nearly Headless Nick

Last Seen: The Chamber of Secrets. To give him his full name, Sir Nicholas de Mimsy Porpington was never a main character in the Harry Potter books, but he was a constant presence whose existence was also a reminder that Hogwarts was far from a normal place. In the movies, he was played by British comedy legend John Cleese, and played the role of interesting exposition conduit more than anything. Rowling used his all-access pass to Hogwarts as a device to allow him a sort of all-seeing state that was never openly acknowledged, but which allowed him to either pass on key information or be present for key events he could then report to Harry. He was also, of course, the weirdest victim of the Basilisk in The Chamber of Secrets.

But almost immediately after being cured of his ghostly petrification (which, troublingly, nobody ever makes any attempt to explain), Sir Nicholas vanishes from the films entirely. Seemingly a victim of a need for tighter run-times, and the extravagant cost of effects that didn’t serve major story purpose, he simply never returns. And he didn’t even get his other major plotline in Chamber of Secrets – the Headless Hunt. This is despite him appearing in every book and becoming enough of a friend to Harry himself that he turns to him after Sirius’ death to ask whether there’s a chance his dead godfather might have stayed as a ghost. Hopefully, we’ll see more of him in the upcoming HBO reboot.

3) Colin Creevey

In the Harry Potter movies, Colin Creevey (who was played by Hugh Mitchell) was something of a flash in the pan character, appearing in only The Chamber of Secrets as a naive annoyance to Harry. A fan of the Boy Who Lived, Colin popped up several times to fawn over his idol, much to Harry’s bewilderment and frustration, before becoming one of the victims of the Basilisk that petrified him. Somewhat unfair writing by JK Rowling, but not entirely ill-fitting with how innocents were treated in this franchise. He’s eventually cured, and then promptly disappears entirely, presumably also cured of his infatuation with Harry.

In the books, though, Colin is a more constant presence after debuting in The Chamber of Secrets, eventually bringing along a brother (who was cut from the movies). The brothers are two of the members when Harry forms Dumbledore’s Army. He also plays an important moral message in the final book when he’s killed at the Battle of Hogwarts and becomes one of Rowling’s flagbearers for the futility and tragedy of war. Famously, Harry sees his dead body being carried from the battlefield by Oliver Wood and Neville Longbottom and thinks to himself that he is “tiny in death.” We didn’t get to see any of that in the movie, though, because Hugh Mitchell apparently aged too quickly, making Colin’s return impossible. He was replaced in Dumbledore’s Army by newly invented stand-in Nigel Wolpert.

2) Vincent Crabbe

Right up to The Half-Blood Prince, Vincent Crabbe stood on one side of Draco Malfoy, with fellow Slytherin Gregory Goyle on the other. But for the final movies, Crabbe disappeared entirely, failing to show for The Deathly Hallows Part I, and then being outright replaced in Part II by Blaise Zabini (a far more exotic name for a henchman). His death in the Room of Requirement was also given to Goyle, after the hapless bully summoned Fiendfyre – dark magic beyond his control – and died in the resulting inferno that also destroyed the Diadem Horcrux. Up to that point, Crabbe had been a comedy foil for Malfoy, a brutish antithesis to Draco’s sharper wit, intended to reflect his narcissism, no doubt.

In the book, Crabbe obviously sticks around for all 7 books before meeting his untimely, but not unjustified end in the Room of Requirement. Blaise Zabini doesn’t appear at all. But thanks to real-life legal issues for actor Jamie Waylett, Crabbe was left out. In 2009, Waylett was arrested on charges of possession of marijuana and pled guilty to growing plants in his mother’s house. He was, understandably, fired by Warner Bros, and was then jailed 2 years later on a separate charges of violent disorder and handling stolen goods following the London Riots of 2011. His defense reported that he had struggled with his fame as a young actor.

1) “Bem”

The legendary Bem is a mystery wrapped in an enigma who became a meme long after the release of The Prisoner of Azkaban. Initially intended only for one scene, the original character created for the movies was played by Ekow Quartey and dropped some incredible but weirdly chilling words of wisdom in the third movie. He also shouldn’t have existed at all. In the books, it’s definitively stated that there are 5 boys in Harry’s year in Gryffindor – Harry Potter, Ronald Weasley, Neville Longbottom, Seamus Finnigan and Dean Thomas – and yet Bem is seen in Harry’s Divination Class, where he drops the absolute banger: “It’s among the darkest omens in our world. It’s an omen… of death.”

He says only one other line – “It’s like trying to catch smoke… Like trying to catch smoke with your bare hands” – but thanks to Quartey’s delivery, the character has grown in infamy over the years. And to think the line about omens was initially written for Lavender Brown to say… But then, as quickly as he appeared, Bem stepped back out of focus, never again appearing, and suggesting he was merely a figment of everyone’s imagination. Fittingly, there’s no official reason for Bem’s disappearance, but Quartey did turn up again as a separate character (an unnamed Ravenclaw in Dumbledore’s Army) in The Order of the Phoenix.

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