After 25 years, Haley Joel Osment is fondly remembering his on-set experience with Bruce Willis.
The Oscar nominee recently reflected on his “fantastic” time as a child actor working with Willis on the M. Night Shyamalan movie The Sixth Sense (1999) and how their behind-the-scenes friendship endured over the years.
“I heard from [Bruce] a lot after it came out in those subsequent years,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “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,” added Osment.
In 2022, Willis’ family announced his retirement after he was diagnosed with aphasia, which progressed to frontotemporal demential the next year.
Haley Joel Osmont and Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense (1999). (Buena Vista/Courtesy Everett Collection)
In The Sixth Sense, Willis plays child psychologist Dr. Malcolm Crowe, who tries to help young Cole Sear (Osment) as he is visited by ghosts. The film earned six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for Osment.
“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.”