Haley Joel Osment joined Entertainment Weekly to reflect on the 25th anniversary of M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” and remembered getting voicemails from co-star Bruce Willis in the years that followed the release of the blockbuster horror film. Osment was just 10 years old when he starred in the film, which earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. “The Sixth Sense” was the second-highest grossing movie of 1999 with $672 million worldwide.
“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,” Osment said. “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.'”
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“I need to find those old answering tapes,” he added. “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.”
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Willis‘ family announced in March 2022 that he had been diagnosed with aphasia and would retire from acting. His condition progressed into frontotemporal dementia. Osment said it was “fantastic” working with Willis on “The Sixth Sense” at such a young age.
“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. 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.”
“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,” Osment added. “It was a script that we all cared about so much and put so much effort into, and Bruce led the way on that.”
Because Osment was such a fan of Willis’ prior to shooting “The Sixth Sense,” he showed up to set expecting the actor to be more like his “Die Hard” character. Willis’ “Sixth Sense” character was “much more subdued and academic,” so watching Willis tackle an entirely different screen personality was a crash course in acting for the young Osment.
“One of the things that makes it such a cool performance — you can sense all that beneath the surface, but it’s this guy who’s living kind of a buttoned-up life and he’s restrained and aloof,” Osment said. “So that contrast between the twinkle you can see in Bruce’s eyes and this colder guy that he’s inhabiting was interesting.”
Head over to Entertainment Weekly’s website to read more from Osment about the 25th anniversary of “The Sixth Sense.”
