Ryan Potter

In Big Hero 6 (2014), Hiro Hamada sits in his room with the door shut, and Ryan Potter lets his voice grow small. The slight crack in his delivery matters: this is a boy who cannot make himself feel better just because help has arrived. Potter gives the sadness its proper weight without sounding as though he is waiting for us to be impressed. We rate that restraint, especially in a film with so much else to keep an audience occupied. It gives us a reason to care before the action takes over.

Maya Rudolph’s Aunt Cass bakes too much and talks too fast, while Baymax scans Hiro and suggests contact with friends. The people around the boy are busy trying to help; Potter does not have to compete with them. We were moved by these scenes because his subdued voice and the robot’s practical care let Hiro remain unhappy without treating him as a problem to hurry past. He is allowed to withdraw, and the film stays with him. That patience is where the performance does its most useful work.

His earlier lead as Mike Fukanaga in Supah Ninjas (2011–2013) established the martial-arts side of his screen work. He returned to Hiro for Big Hero 6: The Series (2017), while Titans (2018–2023) gave him the live-action role of Garfield Logan, or Beast Boy. There, humour and pop-culture references help the character connect with other people, and Potter brings welcome levity to a darker ensemble. The limitation is how often Beast Boy is sidelined, leaving that energy underused. These are different jobs, but youthful eagerness is a recurring demand.

Big Hero 6 also supplies the caveat: once everyone is put in armour, the film becomes a superhero story we have seen before. Potter’s contribution is worth an evening, but it cannot make those familiar developments more interesting. We would like to see more work that gives his quieter delivery as much room as his physical energy. Start with Hiro, and allow for a film that gets less distinctive as its characters become better equipped.