Romani people in fiction

• 1596: A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare – Which includes the lines "Sees Helen's beauty in the brow of Egypt" ("Egyptian" was used to refer to the Romani people of England). Here, Theseus is imagining the face of a lover can make the dark-skinned gypsy look like Helen of Troy, a great beauty.[11][12]
• 1600: As You Like It a pastoral comedy by Shakespeare – He uses the word "ducdame" (Act II, Sc. 5), possibly a corruption or mishearing of the old Anglo-Romani word dukka me or (I foretell or I tell fortunes).[13][14]
• 1603: Othello by Shakespeare – Desdemona's handkerchief a gift to Othello's mother is a gift from an "Egyptian charmer" who can almost read the thoughts of people.[15]
• 1611: The Tempest by Shakespeare – Caliban, the only human inhabitant of the mythical island, is thought to be named after the word Kaliban meaning "black" or "with blackness" in Anglo-Romani.[16] As the first Romani immigrants arrived in England a century before Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, it is thought he may have been influenced by their exotic looks.[14][15]
• 1613: Miguel de Cervantes' novel La Gitanilla
• 1631: Ben Jonson's play Bartholomew Fair. A comedy set in London's Bartholomew Fair where a band of Romani entertain a crowd.
• 18th century: William Wordsworth's Vagrant Muse. A young homeless woman is welcomed by a band of Gypsies who take her in and offer her charity and companionship.
• 1722: Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders. Moll's earliest memory is of wandering "among a group of people they call Gypsies or Egyptians" in England.

• Georges Bizet's 1875 opera Carmen.
• The Cirque du Soleil traveling show Varekai takes its name from the Romani language and the characters represented on stage are loosely based on the nomadic way of life associated with the Romani people.
• Warhammer Fantasy includes an ethnic group of humans, the Strigany, who are often referred to as gypsies. They conflate the Romani with Romanians: the Strigany are from the same geographical area as Romania, and negative stereotypes about the Romani people are justified against the Strigany, who are persecuted for vampire worship and sometimes actually enabling the Undead.[17]
• The Curse of Strahd supplement for Dungeons & Dragons includes a fantasy version of the Romani, the Vistani. Early printings portrayed the Vistani in a stereotyped light.[18]

• In the Batman series of comics, the character Richard Grayson (a.k.a. Robin and Nightwing) is shown to be of at least 1/4 Romani descent.
• DC Comics character Cynthia Reynolds, styles herself after the stereotypical depictions of gypsies and adopts Gypsy (comics) as her superhero identity. Her costume would be updated several times in later years to something less stereotype and her heritage retconned as being Romani.
• Twins Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver respectively, of Marvel Comics are of Romani ancestry through their biological mother Magda and raised in the fictional Mount Wundagore. During Marvel's Mystic Arcana the Scarlet Witch was one of the prominently featured mystic characters and depicted her Romani childhood and her encounter with other Marvel mystical characters.
• Canonical origin of the supervillain Doctor Doom of the Romani people, and was driven to his nominally villainous actions as a response to the persecution of his family. As dictator of the fictional nation of Latveria, Doom has taken a special interest in the welfare of Gypsies, as that is his heritage, and often that race is first to be taken care of in a manner similar to Saddam Hussein showering his Tikriti tribe with benefits.
• Meggan of the Marvel comics superhero team Excalibur was born to a band of Romanies in England. She was expelled when they saw that she was a shapeshifter, and believed her to be a demon.
• Margali Szardos, the foster-mother of Nightcrawler (comics) of the Marvel comics superhero teams Excalibur and X-Men, is a French Romani sorceress.
• In the web comic The Science Table Comic, Alex, one of the recurring characters, is a gypsy and is adorned in what is stated by another character as his "Traditional native garbs."
• Katerina Donlan of Gunnerkrigg Court is referred to as "gypsy" by another character. Tom Sidell, the comic's author, confirmed she is half-Roma, her mother belonging to the gitano ethnical group.

• In the anime Blood +, it is implied that the character Haji is Roma. However, he was bought from his caravan at a young age and does not identify as such thereafter.
• In the anime Cowboy Bebop, the character Faye Valentine claims to be one of the Romani people, though this is later dispelled through her own personal flashbacks.
• In the anime Kaze to Ki no Uta, Serge Battour is the orphaned son of a viscount and a beautiful Roma woman.
• In the Code Geass OVA spinoff, Akito the Exiled, the main cast of characters encounter a group of elderly Romani.
• The Fullmetal Alchemist movie, Conqueror of Shamballa, features Romani women in Pre-Nazi Germany.

• The videogame Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King features Romani characters Kalderasha, named after the Kalderash, and his daughter Valentina.
• In the videogame Psychonauts, a rival gypsy circus curses the main character's family to die in water. The main character and his family are also Romani.
• In Assassin's Creed: Revelations, courtesan NPCs are replaced by Romanies which act as moving hiding spots and can be used to distract guards.
• The Crimson Skies character Nathan Zachary has claimed Romani heritage.
• The four protagonists of Mother Russia Bleeds are all referred to as Romani (their background is vague, but they were apparently raised in an impoverished gypsy camp somewhere in Russia).
• The videogame Bohemian Killing features a gypsy protagonist guilty of murder, who has to try and convince the jury he didn't do it.

• The character Willa Monday on the TV show The Finder is Romani.
• 2013 series Hemlock Grove features a family of Romani.
• 2002 episode of The Twilight Zone features a female Romani.
• In the television show Criminal Minds, the fourth-season episode "Bloodlines" depicts a family of Romani who kidnap little girls to marry their sons.
• 2007 episode of House, in which House must treat a 16-year-old Romani boy with respiratory distress.
• An episode of Dennis the Menace featured a group of Romanies who visited Dennis's town, were accused of theft, and almost inveigled police Officer Murphy into marrying one of their women, to whom he had offered bread at dinner.
• In the first season of Car 54, Where Are You, Maureen Stapleton plays a Romani matriarch telling fortunes from a storefront in Toody and Muldoon's precinct. Stereotypical jokes abound. She lifts a guy's wallet, the father is a layabout, the children don't go to school, they pack up and move to another storefront in short order, etc.
• On the television series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, the detectives investigate a missing Romani boy (Season 13, Episode 9).
• On the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Romanies in 19th Century Romania place a curse on the vampire Angelus to punish him for the murder of a teenage Romani girl, by restoring his human soul (and by extension, his conscience) and forcing him to feel guilt for his crimes. Angel was doomed to misery until he could enjoy a moment of pure happiness. It is later revealed that these Romanies were members of the Kalderash tribe and that the character Jenny Calendar, actually Janna of the Kalderash, is a member of the tribe.
• Greek television series Whispers of the Heart (Greek: Ψίθυροι Καρδιάς) was about a rich architect who falls in love with a young beautiful gypsy girl. It aired in 1997 and it is one of the most popular, Greek television series.
• The BBC television series Peaky Blinders revolves around protagonist Tommy Shelby and the Shelby crime family who are of Romani heritage. It also features the Romani Lee family which includes main character Esme Lee, who marries one of the Shelby brothers.
• In Jim Henson's Fraggle Rock, the sentient anthropomorphic Trash Heap refers to herself as a 'gypsy Trash Heap' when she performs her only act of magic. The character "The Old Gypsy Woman" appears in several episodes.
• Lark Rise to Candleford, Series 2 Episode 1 — A BBC costume drama. The village is haunted by the spirit of a young English Romany girl who drowned in the local lake.
• In the HBO series Carnivàle, the characters of Sophie and her mother Apollonia are said to be Roma.
• The Chilean telenovela Romané features the life of the Romani in the north of Chile.
• Ashes to Ashes Series 2 2009 Episode 2 — A British television police drama series set in the 1980s. A police officer tries to clear her name when she is involved in the accidental death of an English Romanichal. She uncovers a premeditated plot to murder him. The episode does include some stereotypical elements as the plot unfolds; namely the plot device of an old Romani clairvoyant and friction between the police and the Romani camp. However these stereotypes are turned on their head as the local doctor who was obsessed with the victims wife is found guilty of poisoning and elements of police corruption. A supporting principal character is revealed to be part Romani.
• In 2002 the WB television series Charmed aired the episode "The Eyes Have It" which depicted Romanies, referred to as "gypsies", as practicing a magical craft similar to those of modern-day witches. Much like the star witches in the series, Romanies possess supernatural powers and pass down family Books of Shadows.
• The Canterville Ghost (1974) Television dramatization - Based on the (1887) short story by Oscar Wilde. An English gypsy group are suspected of kidnapping a girl but are innocent and join in the search.
• In The Andy Griffith Show, episode 182 in the sixth season is titled "The Gypsies". A family of Romanies (one of whom is played by Jamie Farr) places a curse on the town of Mayberry.
• In the MacGyver episode "Thief of Budapest", MacGyver helps a Romani family escape from the KGB.[19]

Romani characters are frequently depicted in werewolf films, including Maleva the fortuneteller (Maria Ouspenskaya) in The Wolf Man and the Romani clan of female werewolves in Cry of the Werewolf.

• Gypsy (term)
• Antiziganism