A British comedian was cut from a Harry Potter film after filming the scenes.
Funny man Rik Mayall was recruited to play the poltergeist Peeves in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone but the comedian did not make the final cut.
Rik, famous for 80s comedies The Young Ones, The New Statesman and Blackadder shot the scenes he was hired for but director Chris Columbus later decided against using them because he didn’t like the look of Rik’s ghost.
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The comedian spoke of the experience in a 2011 interview.
He said: “I got sent off the set because every time I tried to do a bit of acting, all the lads who were playing the school kids kept getting the giggles, they kept corpsing, so they threw me off.
“Well, they asked me to do it with my back to them and they still laughed.
“So they asked me to do it around the other side of the cathedral and shout my lines, but they still laughed so they said they’d do my lines with someone else.”
He continued: “So then I did a little bit of filming, then I went home and I got the money.
“That’s significant. Then a month later, they said: ‘Er, Rik, we’re sorry about this, but you’re not in the film. We’ve cut you out of the film.’ … But I still got the money. So that is the most exciting film I’ve ever been in, because I got the oodle and I wasn’t in it. Fantastic.”
He didn’t tell his kids his part had been cut, though, and when they went to see it, “they came back and they said: ‘Bloody good make up. You didn’t look like yourself at all dad,’” Mayall said. “They thought I was playing Hagrid, Robbie Coltrane’s part.”
Chris Columbus has said recently that he wants the three-hour extended version of the film featuring Rik to be released. Here’s to hoping we get to see that one day.
