Disney released the first look photo from its middle-grade book adaptation of ARTEMIS FOWL, and it features Dame Judi Dench!

Well, you probably didn’t think you’d want this photo of renowned actress and 10-time BAFTA winner as a fairy commander, but sometimes miracles happen and you get what you never thought you’d want. In this case, it’s a first look image of Judi Dench as Commander Root, the fairy-in-charge of the fairy police force, LEPrecon, in the movie adaptation of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl.

For those who are unfamiliar with the book series, Commander Root was originally a male, which was somewhat important in the developmental arc of character Holly Short, and her relationships with her fellow fairy officers as well as with Root. However, and with the permission of Colfer, director Kenneth Branagh was able to establish Root as a female. How this changes things for Holly in the film, we have yet to see, but Branagh gives us a hint.

“We have tensions and passions inside her relationship with her fellow officers and with Root, but they’re also to do with her achieving her work on merit,” says Branagh. “It felt as though what we needed, whoever was the force, the personality, the intelligence, the kind of commanding disciplinarian figure to be someone against whom Holly could really react and interact with, who represented a sort of benign authority, and who, to some extent, was partly on her side, was partly her sponsor, was partly her mentor, and in a way sort of a role model. So the tensions between them, which come from the book, exist here but they’re in a different kind of form, and they can be as complicated as they are in the here and now in our own world. It felt like conversations like that had moved on.”

Here’s a closer look of Dench as the pointy-eared fairy police leader.

Artemis Fowl flies into theaters August 9, 2019.

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