See him, hear him

Comedy actor Scott Adsit silent in St. Vincent, a voice in Big Hero 6

By: RANDALL KING Posted: 1:00 AM CST Thursday, Nov. 6, 2014

Here's an odd fact: Scott Adsit, best known as tightly wound comedy show producer Pete Hornberger on the comedy series 30 Rock, is seen but not heard as Melissa McCarthy's philandering husband in the comedy-drama St. Vincent, now in theatres. And he is heard but not seen as the voice of Baymax, an inflatable medical robot in the Disney animated feature Big Hero 6, in theatres tomorrow.

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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/11/2014 (4318 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Here’s an odd fact: Scott Adsit, best known as tightly wound comedy show producer Pete Hornberger on the comedy series 30 Rock, is seen but not heard as Melissa McCarthy’s philandering husband in the comedy-drama St. Vincent, now in theatres. And he is heard but not seen as the voice of Baymax, an inflatable medical robot in the Disney animated feature Big Hero 6, in theatres tomorrow.

Adsit, 48, asserts the two roles weren’t some kind of double-pronged career strategy but a simple coincidence.

“But you can always put Baymax’s voice over my character in St. Vincent and see what happens,” he says, laughing. “You’ll get a full performance.”

Disney
Hiro hoses down his robot, Baymax, in Big Hero 6. — Disney Hiro hoses down his robot, Baymax, in Big Hero 6.

You might say Adsit owes getting the voice role of Baymax to David Hasselhoff. The Chicago-born actor has lent his voice to the stop-motion Adult Swim series Moral Orel as angry religious hypocrite Clay Puppington. But he believes getting the role had more to do with Disney representatives being in attendance the night he performed in the one-night-only show Celebrity Autobiography, “where celebrities get up onstage and read excepts from other celebrities’ autobiographies, where they essentially hang themselves with their own rope,” Adsit explains.

That night, Adsit was on fire, reading the prologue of Hasselhoff’s autobiography, Don’t Hassel the Hoff. (“I had to prove that I was more than a guy in a red Speedo, running in slow motion across a beach.”)

“Whatever it is they liked about me, they invited me in the next day,” he says of being cast as Baymax.

The robot is a departure from other screen robots in that he is a soft, marshmallow-like inflatable ‘bot. He is drawn into a comic-book style adventure solely because his medical program fixates him on helping the human boy-inventor Hiro recover from the loss of his older brother.

Accordingly, Baymax’s speaks in warm, comforting tones not far removed from Douglas Rain’s voicing of HAL, the artificial intelligence heard in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“Baymax is in that realm of trying to sound seamlessly human for the benefit of comfort and trust,” Adsit says. “But I think the way we went with Baymax was a little different from HAL, because it’s not seamless. You can hear him injecting variables into sentences that don’t always fit like a perfect puzzle piece.”

Adsit likens the voice to something more akin to a cable company robo-operator.

“They say: ‘Your call is important to us. It will be answered in the next … eight … minutes.’ That’s where the rhythm of Baymax came from.

“That technology is not quite there yet. So that’s why he doesn’t sound like C-3P0 and he doesn’t sound like the robot from Lost in Space. We’re somewhere in the middle there.”

Voice acting might seem an ill fit for Adsit, given that his performing roots are in improvisational comedy, making it up as he went along on the stage of Chicago’s Second City (alongside pal and castmate Nia Vardalos). But he says the film’s directors were “generous” with allowing him some creative wiggle room.

“They let me play within the script and skirt outside the lines a little bit, and sometimes I’d colour outside the lines and sometimes I’d just colour on a different page entirely,” he says.

“They were patient, trusting and collaborative enough to allow me to play like that,” he says. “And a lot of those scenes, I think, are in the film.”