‘Sixth Sense’ star Haley Joel Osment reveals why he took a 15-year hiatus from acting
He sees dead people.
Former child star Haley Joel Osment, now 36, gave a rare life update about why he took a long hiatus from the spotlight.
“My parents used to say when I first started out in this industry, ‘If it’s ever not fun, you can quit tomorrow,'” Osment told E! News in an interview published on Sunday.
He explained, “And when I got to be college age, I got to go off and study theater and really think hard about whether I wanted to do this as my career in life.”
Osment rose to fame starring as the troubled young boy Cole Sear in M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” alongside Bruce Willis.
Osment won an Oscar nomination for the role when he was only 11.
As a child, he also appeared in “Forrest Gump” with Tom Hanks, “Secondhand Lions” with Michael Caine and Robert Duvall, and “A.I: Artificial Intelligence” with Jude Law.
“It’s still a job that I really enjoy, despite all the uncertainty and the difficulty of being able to plan your life three to six months out,” he said.
When Osment stepped back from showbiz to attend NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2006, “those were pretty tense years in terms of how celebrity was in Los Angeles,” he said.
The former “Sixth Sense” star recalled there was “this very predatory, aggressive kind of tabloid engagement with certain celebrities.”
He continued, “I remember being very happy to not be making my home in Los Angeles at that time.”
Osment, whose sister Emily, 32, is also an actress (best known for “Young Sheldon” and the upcoming third “Big Bang Theory” spinoff show) ended up living in New York City for over a decade.
He slowly returned to acting with small roles in “What We Do in the Shadows,” “Wednesday,” and “The Kominsky Method,” as well as various voice acting roles in video games like “Kingdom Hearts II.”
The “Secondhand Lions” star told the outlet that he thinks paparazzi culture has “mellowed out a bit” since the early 2000s.
“We’re in a different era than we were,” he said.
“When I came up in this industry, the internet was around but it wasn’t so omnipresent that it is today. So for younger actors today, I’m always really impressed with them being able to manage the TikTok / Instagram / social media landscape, because that’s not something I ever really had to deal with at that age.”
Osment admitted that it took him “a long time to figure out how to navigate social media,” but now he’s gotten used to it and even likes posting on Instagram.
The actor said, “At this point I’m comfortable with it … in this very large media environment, it’s the way to promote your projects and help people keep up to date on what you’re doing within the balance of reasonable privacy. I resisted it for so long and now it’s like, ‘Hey, it’s fun to do some posts.’”
Osment also reflected on his “Sixth Sense” co-star Bruce Willis, who retired from acting in 2022 after being diagnosed with aphasia.
“He is just such a legend,” Osment said. “It’s been hard to see what he and his family have had to go through. It gives you some comfort that does have such a wonderful family. They’re all so close and have been handling a really difficult situation in a really courageous way, so I admire them a lot.”
Osment will next appear in “Blink Twice,” Zoe Kravitz’s directorial debut, in theaters Aug. 23.
