On DC Universe‘s Doom Patrol all of the heroes are quirky with their powers not exactly the super speed and strength variety most would expect from the good guys. However, even in an already unusual group, both Robotman and Negative Man are unique in that their specific situations leave them without true faces — Robotman is, well, a robot and Negative Man is wrapped head-to-toe in bandages. The series doesn’t shy away from these predicaments, having one set of actors physically play the “faceless” characters while Brendan Fraser and Matt Bomer provide their voices. It creates a very specific challenge, but according to showrunner Jeremy Carver, it’s one that has worked out very well
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In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Carver spoke about the challenges of having two actors play each character as well as what it what it was like to have scenes where neither character’s mouth would move.
“It didn’t really hit me until a couple weeks before shooting that we had five-page scenes between Robotman and Negative Man in which neither one has a moving mouth, you can’t see their faces, and the people talking aren’t actually the people in the scene,” Carver said. “It felt exciting, but also a little scary!”
He went on to describe how, in Robotman’s case specifically, they brought the two parts together.
“We took the two Robotman actors, Brendan and Riley, in a room, and they frankly studied one another,” Carver said. “Riley studied Brendan’s movements and his acting/speech patterns, and we took something of a risk because we had Brendan perform a scratch track before each episode, but Riley performed the scene on the set. He’s listening to Brendan’s voice and reacting to that, Riley performs it, but even before I see the cut, they lay in the scratch track from Brendan which we then refine with additional performance. My point being, it’s not until weeks and weeks after we shot the first episode that we got a sense of whether it actually worked, and by then we were well on to shooting other episodes. It was a moment of relief, and frankly a moment of magic, to see how Brendan and Riley and Matt and Matthew worked so well in concert with one another. It was one of those things that, had it not worked, it could’ve been a disaster! The fact that it did work was miraculous.”
Putting together the Robotman and Negative Man pieces isn’t the only thing that worked out better than perhaps Carver expected. He explained in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that the decision to build a physical set piece to look like the belly of a giant rat was also a huge risk, but one that also worked out well.
“In the finale, Cliff going into the belly of a kaiju rat and having his journey in the belly of whale arc, we really didn’t know how we were going to pull that absurd, crazy moment off,” Carver said. “At first, we thought it was going to be a CG creation, a digital Cliff inside a digital belly. Relatively late in the process we decided, ‘You know, let’s go for it! Let’s actually build the belly of a giant rat where Cliff is sitting in stomach acid.’”
“And the production designer went for it,” he continued. “Suffice to say he had never designed the innards of a rat before. He came up with this idea and it came off spectacularly well. We didn’t know if we’d be able to pull that one off, building the stomach lining of a rat, because it’s such an odd thing to request and have to build on a TV timeline. But we did! [Laughs] It was what, 75% accurate? Who knows, really! Every episode had some great challenge that our production team just jumped at and no one ever said can’t, it was always finding a way to do it. For that, I was eternally grateful.”
Doom Patrol Season 1 is now streaming on DC Universe.
