Warning: Spoilers for Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them are in this article. If you haven't seen the film yet, bookmark this page and apparate to another story at once.
At the end of Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, it is revealed that actor Colin Farrell's Percival Graves has actually been actor Johnny Depp's Gellert Grindelwald in disguise the whole time. Now while this makes for a surprising reveal that oh-so-subtly ties into the next installment of the Fantastic Beasts series, it leaves one very important question on everyone's minds: where's the real Percival Graves? Well, if Farrell's word is anything to go by, the man's dead and gone.
MTV got the actor's insight into his character's fate during a red carpet interview at CinemaCon, and Farrell's actual quote is even grimmer than how we've prefaced it above. His exact prognosis for Percival Graves is, as follows:
Maybe he's buried in a shallow grave and he's going to die of starvation 17 hours after the film ends.
While Colin Farrell's imagined ending to the actual Percival Graves' offscreen life is dark and depressing, it fits perfectly in line with J.K. Rowling's Wizarding World. Even if you solely focus on the events of Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, you've got a war brewing between the lighter and darker sides of magic, which ultimately claims some of its first victims on both sides in director David Yates' very successful prequel to the Harry Potter series.
However, don't expect this information to be visually confirmed anytime soon, as Farrell has also confirmed that Percival Graves will not be coming back in any future installments of the Fantastic Beasts canon. Though the more we think about it, just because Graves won't be returning in the flesh, it doesn't mean his story won't be wrapped up on camera. It could be as simple as a throwaway line, and as complicated as a subplot that occupies Fantastic Beasts 2's story, but while we won't exactly see Graves' grave on camera, it doesn't mean it isn't there.
Ultimately, it kind of sucks that Colin Farrell's time in the Wizarding World is finished, as his Percival Graves was well-received, and could have been a fantastic asset to the Fantastic Beasts franchise in the years to come. But with an overall shift back to the European theater of magical warfare, even if Graves survived, he'd probably not be seen that often, if ever again. Though if we were to close the matter with a positive viewpoint, it would be that at least the voracious fan fiction writers who love Graves have plenty of room to choose their own fate for the fallen Auror.
Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them is currently available on Digital HD, Blu-Ray and DVD, with Fantastic Beasts 2 slated for a November 16, 2018 release date.
