Doom Patrol star Brendan Fraser, who plays former race car driver Cliff Steele-slash-Robotman in the DC Comics-inspired streaming series, will serve as the Honorary Pace Car Driver for the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series O’Reilly Auto Parts 500 at Texas Motor Speedway on Sunday, March 31, NASCAR announced.
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Fraser will drive the Official Pace Vehicle of Texas Motor Speedway, a 2019 Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck, pacing the 1.5-mile tri-oval leading up to the race to last for 334 laps and 501 miles.
“Cliff Steele’s a straight up narcissist,” Fraser told ComicBook.com when explaining what attracted him to his DC Universe role. “He’s a daredevil. Okay, so he drives cars fast, and I question if, or not, he really won those races all fair and square. He’s a glory hound, and a cheater in more than one way, not just on the track. Yes, he needs to get it together, but it’s too late before he makes the decision to turn things around if he can, when he immediately loses his wife and child, or does he? Keep watching. It’s a comic book.”
Steele’s devil-may-care lifestyle resulted in a horrific accident that left his body an empty shell, and now his brain has been embedded within a powerful, robotic body through the Frankenstein-like efforts of Dr. Caulder (Timothy Dalton).
“His journey as the beautiful creature of The Chief, as a creationist. And I say that straight from the spirit of whatever moved Mary Shelley to have a brain put in another body,” Fraser said. “Maybe she borrowed it from mythology, when Prometheus really annoyed the gods for stealing thunder to animate clay and create a man. He was punished for an eternity to push a boulder up a hill, wasn’t he? No, that’s Sisyphus. Anyway, a very highfalutin’ answer.”
The hook, Fraser added, was Cliff learning “to become a better human as a robot than he was as a human encased in a robotic environment, a car, an engine.”
Doom Patrol is available exclusively through the DC Universe streaming service.
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