- Osment shot to fame as a child for his role in the M.Night Shyamalan thriller
- He received an Academy award nomination for best supporting actor for his performance in the 1999 film
- Osment’s friendship with co-star Willis blossomed over the years
Haley Joel Osment has shared a heartwarming story about his Sixth Sense co-star Bruce Willis and how the veteran actor would periodically check in on him in the years after they starred together in M.Night Shyamalan’s legendary ghost story thriller.
Osment was just 11-years-old when he starred in the film, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in the process. Willis, with the original Die Hard trilogy, Pulp Fiction, 12 Monkeys, Armageddon and Fifth Element under his belt, was a well established Hollywood leading man by 1999. And he put that experience to good use following the release and phenomenal critical and commercial success of the Sixth Sense.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Osment recalled how Willis would check in on him out of the blue, allowing their friendship to continue in the 25 years following the release of the film.
“I heard from [Bruce] a lot after it came out in those subsequent years. He’d leave voicemails at the house from time to time, just checking in. He would just call out of the blue, so sometimes it was in the lead up before travel. We went to Japan together twice, if I remember correctly, to open Sixth Sense in different cities. So he would call ahead of that, and then sometimes I would just come home from school and the answering machine would be blinking and it’d be him going like, ‘Hey, Haley Joel. Just saying hi.
“I need to find those old answering tapes. I know we preserved those. I know his daughters a little bit, but I have not spoken to him since the news of his health in recent years.”
In 2022, it was revealed by Willis’ family that the 69-year-old was suffering from aphasia, which has since developed into frontotemporal dementia.
In the Sixth Sense, Willis plays child psychologist Dr. Malcolm Crowe, who begins working with nine-year-old boy Cole Sear, played by Osment, and discovers that Sear can see dead people and is regularly visited by their ghosts. The film received six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.
Talking further about his experience with Willis, Osment said, “I had worked with Tom Hanks before on Forrest Gump and other big name actors, but at that point I was old enough to have seen a lot of Bruce’s movies, which added a lot of excitement to it,” he recalled. “And that’s something that lasts your entire career, where you get to work with people who you’ve enjoyed watching in other things. And it made a huge impression on me because that was the first gigantic celebrity that I’d worked with at an age where I was aware of his stardom.”
Osment continued, “He did everything in such a cool way, and had such charisma, and was the person that you want on set setting the tone for the sort of movie we were making, because things usually revolve around the No. 1 on the call sheet. It was a script that we all cared about so much and put so much effort into, and Bruce led the way on that.”
