Contrary to intuitive thinking, it can be difficult playing an emotionless character.

Such was the challenge that actor Scott Adsit faced in voicing Baymax, a central figure in the animated Disney feature Big Hero 6 (which opens Friday, November 7).

In the film, which is based on an obscure 2008 Marvel comic mini-series about a Japanese superhero team, Baymax is an inflatable (and goofy-looking) healthcare robot. The original comic-book character, in contrast, was a robotic male who can transform either into a dragon or a mecha.

On the line from Toronto, Adsit explains that Marvel gave Disney free reign with the film adaptation, since the comic book wasn’t a hit. (As a lifelong comic book fan who, in fact, learned to read from comics, Adsit adds that he was surprised he hadn’t heard of the comic.)

Baymax, we learn from the movie, was created by Tadashi Hamada at the Institute of Technology in San Fransokyo (a San Francisco-Tokyo mashup). Our hero, the aptly named Hiro Hamada, inherits Baymax from his older brother. Hiro forms a tech-powered crime-fighting team with Tadashi’s researcher friends to solve the mystery of who is really behind an evil-doer’s mask. In the process, Hiro transforms Baymax from a health robot into an unintentionally hilarious warrior.

Adsit praised the east-west fusion of both the setting and characters in the film—something Vancouver audiences will be able to relate to.

"I think it's great because it doesn't play into the plot much at all," he says. "It just is treated as a truism. Just like Hiro's race—he's a mixed-race Asian American—and that doesn't show up in the script at all. It's just a fact, and I think that's great."

Adsit, who plays Pete Hornberger on 30 Rock, first saw Baymax at audition, but it wasn't until six months into process when he saw an animation test of three different versions of how the Stay Puft Marshmellow Man–like Baymax might move: one with a diaper, a full diaper (yikes), and a penguin. The last one won.

"When I saw it, I just laughed hysterical," Adsit says. "He's just so beautifully simple and familiar somehow.…He's a bunch of diametrically opposed qualities: he's an authority figure who is an innocent and he is huge but very gentle, and he's like a baby—you want to hug him, you want to take care of him—but it's his job to take care of you."

After seeing the completed film, Adsit noticed how Baymax evolves from a baby and son to a brother and father for Hiro. However, he pointed out that this subtle arc is more a result of viewer interpretation than his performance.

"It's almost as if the audience is doing all the work and projecting the emotions that they hope he's having because he doesn't display them at all. There's no point in the film where you can say, 'Well, there's where he is showing his heart.' "

Withholding his own emotions proved to be difficult for Adsit. His previous voice work for Adult Swim animated series such as Moral Orel had been "about plumbing yourself for the depths of despair or anger or ecstasy". Baymax, in contrast, required him to neutralize that tendency.

"I'm used to being a very emotional performer, and very physical too, and so in the booth, I found myself kind of restraining myself and making sure I didn't move off where I was standing because his voice has to be calm. That's his job: to be a calmer. There are some points in the film where it pulls your heartstrings and I had to stop a few times because I was really feeling a lot of emotion in the scene as an actor."

Yet, there was another challenge: the film is a comedy. In spite of Baymax's emotionless and expressionless behaviour, Adsit, a sketch and improv veteran, had to keep in mind this was a comedic performance. He explains that he found that the humour about Baymax "comes mostly from the fact that he's not really acting as you might expect someone to". Also, unlike live-action comedy, he says that the comedic timing in this performance came from a collaborative effort between him, the director, and the animators.

Meanwhile, Adsit is busy at work developing an off-Broadway show with five other improvisers who will perform in different venues on a weekly basis and will appear in the live-action Adult Swim TV series The Heart, She Holler in December. He also says he does improv in New York City every chance he can get.

So will we be seeing Baymax on stage one day soon? One can only hope.