71 Best Fictional Characters That Start With H, Ranked

Harry Potter is the obvious answer, and he brings most of his school with him.

H belongs to the Wizarding World more than any other letter: Hermione, Hagrid, Hedwig, Horace Slughorn and two of the four Hogwarts founders.

Seventy-one characters, starting with the one on the broomstick.

Our Top 10 Characters That Start With H, Ranked

Joanne Rowling wrote the opening of the first book in an Edinburgh café with a small child asleep beside her, and twelve publishers turned the manuscript down before Bloomsbury took it on the advice of the chairman’s eight-year-old daughter.

What followed is the biggest publishing event of the modern era. The seven books have sold more than 600 million copies, the film series ran for a decade and made adults of its three leads on camera, and the character gave a generation a shared reference set the way Star Wars had twenty years earlier.

HBO’s television adaptation arrives in 2027 with Dominic McLaughlin in the role, recasting a character most readers still picture as Radcliffe.

First, and the only entry here with a theme park land on three continents.

Dan Castellaneta based the voice on Walter Matthau and found he could not sustain it through a full recording session, so it drifted into the lower, slower version everyone knows by the third series.

Homer is the most quoted character in television history and the reason “d’oh” is in the Oxford English Dictionary, marked as an interjection expressing frustration at one’s own stupidity. The show has run for more than 35 years, and its middle stretch, roughly series three to nine, is the most influential comedy writing of the 1990s.

He is also the rare character to survive his own franchise’s decline. Newer episodes are a shadow of the peak, and the character has lost nothing.

Second, and still the benchmark for animated fathers.

Harrison Ford was a working carpenter reading lines off camera for other actors’ auditions when George Lucas cast him, and Ford spent the next three films asking to have the character killed off because he thought Han had nowhere left to go.

He was wrong for a decade and right in the end. Han is the cynic in a story about faith, the one who calls the Force a hokey religion and comes back anyway, and the performance carries the tonal balance the original trilogy depends on. “I know” was Ford’s line, not the script’s.

He finally got the death he asked for in 2015, at his son’s hands on a bridge over a reactor shaft.

Third, and the reason every franchise since has tried to write a rogue.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby built him from Jekyll and Hyde and Frankenstein’s monster in 1962, and the first issue coloured him grey. Printing problems with the grey pushed the character to green by the second issue, which is how the most recognisable colour choice in comics happened by accident.

The 1978 television series is what made him a household name outside comic shops, with Bill Bixby playing the man and Lou Ferrigno painted green as the transformation. Universal’s rights to a standalone Hulk film have kept him a supporting player in Marvel’s own films ever since, where Mark Ruffalo has now played him for over a decade.

Fourth, and the only Avenger whose weakness and weapon are the same thing.

Hermione solves most of the plot. Harry has the scar and the destiny, and Hermione has the library card, the Time-Turner and the survival skills that keep all three of them alive through the seventh book.

The writing carries every anxiety of a clever eleven-year-old: the marks, the insufferable hand in the air, the fear of being found out as ordinary. Emma Watson played her from nine years old to twenty-one on screen.

The 2016 casting of Noma Dumezweni in Cursed Child made plain how little the books specify about her appearance.

Fifth, and the reason a generation of readers decided being clever was a personality.

Anthony Hopkins is on screen for around sixteen minutes in The Silence of the Lambs and won Best Actor for it, in a film that took all five major Oscars, something only two other films have managed.

Thomas Harris built the character on a prison doctor he met in Mexico while reporting, and the appeal has always been the manners rather than the violence. Lecter is courteous, cultured and interested in people, which is what makes the cannibalism land. Brian Cox played him first in Manhunter, and Mads Mikkelsen’s television version is the one critics tend to rate highest.

Sixth, and the best argument in film for keeping a villain off screen.

Paul Dini wrote her as a one-scene henchwoman for a 1992 episode of Batman: The Animated Series, built around his friend Arleen Sorkin and a dream sequence she had filmed on a soap opera. She was never meant to return.

Thirty years later she is one of DC’s most valuable characters, with her own films, her own animated series and a merchandise line that outsells most of the Justice League. The arc that got her there, from the Joker’s abused accomplice to a character who leaves him, is one of the few genuine feminist rewrites in mainstream comics.

Margot Robbie has played her in three films and produced the best of them.

Seventh, and the only character here created for television who conquered the comics.

Hello Kitty was drawn for a coin purse in 1974 and has no mouth, which Sanrio has explained as a deliberate blank, leaving the viewer to project a mood onto her. In 2014 the company told a researcher she is not a cat but a British schoolgirl named Kitty White, a claim that caused a minor international incident.

She anchors one of the most valuable character licences ever created, worth billions annually at its peak, and she has done it with essentially no story attached. There is no arc to follow and nothing to spoil.

Eighth, and the only entry on this list whose species is disputed by her own publisher.

Stanley Kubrick cast Douglas Rain after hearing him narrate a documentary, and told him to play the computer as something closer to a hurt, reasonable colleague than a machine. Nothing in the performance is raised, and the film’s most frightening moment is a polite refusal about a pod bay door.

HAL set the template for every artificial intelligence in fiction since, and did it in 1968, decades before the technology was a live question. The red lens, the slowed voice during the shutdown, and the pod bay doors are all permanent fixtures of the culture.

Arthur C. Clarke always denied that HAL’s name was IBM shifted one letter back, which has never stopped anyone repeating it.

Ninth, and the reason a calm voice is now shorthand for a machine about to turn.

The half-giant gamekeeper is the first adult in the series to treat Harry decently, and Robbie Coltrane played him with a warmth that made the character the emotional anchor of the films. Hagrid‘s judgement is terrible throughout: he raises a dragon in a wooden hut, buys a three-headed dog and tells strangers things he should not. That is the point. He is the argument the books keep making about kindness mattering more than competence, and Coltrane’s death in 2022 was mourned by a generation who grew up with him.

Tenth, and the kindest adult in the whole Wizarding World.

More Iconic Fictional Characters Starting With H

Hercules has been in continuous circulation for around 2,500 years, which no other character here can claim. The twelve labours predate every franchise on this list and have been rewritten by Greeks, Romans, Renaissance painters, Hollywood, Marvel and Disney without the core surviving much damage.

Disney’s 1997 version is the one most readers picture, with a gospel chorus narrating and James Woods playing Hades as a Hollywood agent. It underperformed against The Lion King and has aged into one of the studio’s most liked films of the period. A live-action remake is in development with the Russo brothers.

James Woods improvised most of the performance, playing the lord of the underworld as a fast-talking Los Angeles agent who has been stuck in a job he hates for eternity. It is the funniest villain Disney has written, and the one that most obviously influenced what came after. Disney’s live-action remake has the difficult task of recasting a performance nobody wants recast.

DreamWorks’ clearest character success: a Viking teenager who is bad at being a Viking, gets a disability in the first film’s climax and keeps it for the rest of the trilogy. The How to Train Your Dragon films are the studio’s best work, and the 2025 live-action remake took over $600 million, which suggests the audience that grew up with him has not gone anywhere.

The Avenger with no powers, a bow, and the most thankless job in the team. Jeremy Renner’s version spends the first film mind-controlled by Loki and the next decade earning his place, and the Disney+ series with Hailee Steinfeld finally gave the character the working-class, deaf, dad-of-three characterisation the Matt Fraction comics run had built for him. That comics run is still the best single Marvel series of the last fifteen years.

Cate Blanchett’s goddess of death arrives in Thor: Ragnarok, destroys Thor’s hammer in her first scene and reveals that Asgard’s golden age was built on conquest her family painted over. It is the most interesting idea in any of the Thor films, delivered by a villain in antlers, and Blanchett plays it with obvious enjoyment.

Antony Starr’s performance is the most disturbing on television in the last decade: a Superman analogue raised in a lab by a corporation, with the emotional regulation of a toddler and no check on his power. The Boys is not subtle, and Homelander works because Starr plays the neediness rather than the strength. Every terrible thing he does comes from wanting to be loved.

A voice-synthesiser product from 2007 with a turquoise ponytail, who became a global pop star without existing. Miku’s songs are written by her audience, tens of thousands of them, and she performs as a projection to arena crowds. She has opened for Lady Gaga and headlined Coachella. No character on this list has a stranger claim to fame: she is a piece of software with a fandom that produces her entire catalogue.

Sandor Clegane is the show’s best-written cynic, a burned killer who despises knights and ends up as the closest thing Arya Stark has to a guardian. Rory McCann plays him as a man permanently irritated by the world’s hypocrisy, and his road-trip episodes with Arya are the best two-hander in the series. His last scene, the fight with his brother, was demanded by fans for years under a name the show never used on screen.

A character who says one word for six seasons, then gets the most devastating reveal in the show: the word is his own death sentence, fed back through time. Kristian Nairn played the part on almost nothing for years, which is what made the episode land. It remains the moment Game of Thrones is most remembered for outside the Red Wedding.

Mike Judge’s propane salesman is one of the most precisely observed characters in American animation, a decent, rigid Texan who wants everyone to behave and cannot say what he feels. King of the Hill was overshadowed by The Simpsons for thirteen years and has aged better than almost any of its contemporaries. The 2025 revival brought the character back into a world he understands even less.

A stuffed tiger to everyone else and a real one to Calvin, and the strip never settles which version is true. The strip ran for ten years, ended while it was at its peak, and has never been licensed for merchandise, which is why there are no Hobbes toys and why the strip’s reputation is untouched. He is the best-drawn friendship in comics.

The most performed role in the English language, and a character who has been played by every actor with ambitions for four centuries. Hamlet gave the culture the skull, the soliloquy and the archetype of the indecisive intellectual, and the play has been adapted into everything from The Lion King to a dozen films. Nothing else on this list has lasted as long in its original form.

Emily Brontë’s foundling is the source code for the brooding romantic lead, and a warning about it. Generations of readers have mistaken Heathcliff for a romantic hero when the novel treats him as a man who destroys two families out of spite. He is still being adapted, most recently by Emerald Fennell, and the argument about how to read him has not settled in 180 years.

The Belgian detective with the moustache and the order-obsessed mind, and the only fictional character ever to receive an obituary on the front page of the New York Times. Christie wrote him across 33 novels and grew to dislike him. David Suchet played him for 24 years and every story, and Kenneth Branagh has since taken three films at him.

The voice that half of American literary fiction has been imitating since 1951, and the character adolescents claim and adults reread with less sympathy. Salinger refused every film offer for the rest of his life, which is why Holden exists only on the page. The novel still sells around a quarter of a million copies a year.

Disney’s robotics prodigy, and the lead of the studio’s most successful Marvel adaptation, which most viewers do not realise is a Marvel adaptation at all. Big Hero 6 won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2015, and the relationship between Hiro and Baymax carries a story about grief that is aimed squarely at children and does not talk down to them.

Characters Beginning With H, By Franchise

Harry Potter

Star Wars

Marvel and DC

Disney and Pixar

Television

Anime and manga

Video games

Horror and folklore

Books and classics

Children’s animation

Best Characters Beginning With H for Scattergories Players

The rule is the same in most editions: an answer has to be a character whose name starts with the rolled letter, and anyone at the table can challenge an answer they do not recognise. H is a strong letter, mostly thanks to the Wizarding World. This is unofficial fan guidance, not connected to the game’s publisher.

• Harry Potter
• Homer Simpson
• Han Solo
• Hulk
• Hermione Granger
• Hello Kitty
• Hannibal Lecter
• Hercules

For double-letter bonus points (two words both starting with H)

• Harry Potter
• Hermione Granger
• Homer Simpson
• Han Solo
• Harley Quinn
• Hello Kitty
• Hank Hill
• Hannibal Smith
• Hector Rivera
• Hyacinth Bucket
• Heihachi Mishima

Frequently Asked Questions

Working through the alphabet? The I page is next, or browse the characters hub for everything by franchise.