Twenty-five years after breaking through in the smash Sixth Sense, the actor has worked steadily, finding a balance that has eluded some child stars.

Haley Joel Osment’s childhood memories are not like other people’s. He
remembers the kindness with which Tom Hanks treated him, when he was 5 and playing Hanks’ son in Forrest Gump. And the time Russell Crowe adjusted his bow tie at an awards show when Osment, not yet 12, was Oscar-nominated for his breakout performance in The Sixth Sense. The in-depth conversations he had with Steven Spielberg about the future as they were filming A.I. that same year.

A phalanx of Osment clones, made for that movie, are still floating around – he heard they might have ended up stockpiled in Peter Jackson’s trove of memorabilia in New Zealand. If the apocalypse happens, Osment jokes, that preteen version of him will survive.

It is, in any case, the form in which many fans know him best – especially as the notably named Cole Sear, the teary-eyed centre of The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan’s blockbuster supernatural thriller from August 1999. Osment’s indelibly whispered line, “I see dead people,” went from the trailer to the canon of cinema to pop culture infamy long before memes even existed to codify it (though they have now). It was a phrase so potent that, 25 years after its arrival, it is a Kendrick Lamar lyric – on a Drake diss track, no less.

With its final-act twist, The Sixth Sense also, some cineastes argue, started “spoiler culture” – meaning that mass moviedom as we know it, with entire publicity campaigns and prickly fan bases fiercely safeguarding plotlines, sprang from that moment. A 10-year-old paired with an action star (Bruce Willis), playing against type as a child therapist, spooked audiences into repeat views, and today we scour the screen for Easter eggs and hope for the thrill of a shock.

Osment is now 36; he has been a working actor for nearly nine-tenths of his life, in drama, comedy, fantasy, animation, period pieces, video games and oddball stuff. He has enough credits that when a cast was made of his arm for the Amazon superhero series The Boys, he was able to use it again, seasons later, to beat someone in the FX vampire satire What We Do in the Shadows.

“I feel like that’s sort of a symbol of a lot of what my career has been,” he said. “I’ve been around for long enough to where I’ve got some arms in storage, if we need to use them.”

His latest film is Blink Twice, Zoë Kravitz’s buzzy feature directorial debut, out in New Zealand cinemas on August 22, in which he plays one of the guests on a tech billionaire’s private party island. When I met up with Osment at an outdoor taco spot in Los Angeles, he had just finished the media training for that movie and had been coached not to reveal its secrets. (He dutifully complied.)

The Sixth Sense got no such preamble, he said: it was a total sleeper hit.

It didn’t even occur to Shyamalan, who also wrote the movie, that audiences might “go around spoiling the ending,” the director said in an interview. (And he didn’t like it when it happened: “You can’t talk about the ending – even now, you shouldn’t talk about the ending.”) The success of Sixth Sense, which was the second-highest-grossing movie that year, behind only Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, supercharged Shyamalan’s Hollywood standing, and earned him an early reputation as a master of the reveal, which he has been grappling with ever since.

Osment’s audition “was a very pivotal moment in my career,” Shyamalan said. “When he walked out, I turned to the casting director and said, ‘I don’t think I want to make this without him.’”

Though as an adult, Osment has played villains, entitled richies and unscrupulous techies, it was the trust that audiences had in him from his childhood roles that drew Kravitz to cast him – somewhat subversively – as a washed-up TV actor, she said in a recent video interview.

He brought a sense of comfort (“I’ve been watching him since I was a kid,” she noted) that was at odds with his character. “There’s like this bitterness that he was able to find so wonderfully and with so much humour,” she said, “like those people who are just so friendly – but then there’s this look behind the eyes that’s a little bit like, ‘Are you OK?’”

Over lunch, in a low-key black shirt and the bushy beard he grew to be less recognisable – which instead became his signature – Osment seemed not just fine but entirely genial, chatting amiably if not passionately, and brushing his shoulder-length flowy hair aside as he spoke. (Its days were numbered: a haircut was imminent. “I’ve done enough with this look recently,” he said.)

He became most animated talking about the industry turmoil that brought on the recent strikes. “There’s been a real devaluing of the people’s work and time,” he said. “I could get better residual cheques from some tiny thing I did in the early ‘90s than people get for a huge role on a streaming service now. That’s wrong. It prevents a lot of people from getting a foothold in an industry where, back in the ‘90s, you could survive” on small TV parts.

Osment, though, doesn’t dwell on his origins – even when news of the Lamar track woke him up recently in Ireland, where he was shooting the hit Netflix series Wednesday. (No spoilers for that role, either.) His childhood catchphrase is so far in the rearview he didn’t utter it, only breezily mentioning, as he has in countless interviews, that no one expected it to take off that way. “Nobody highlighted that line when we were shooting it,” he said. “It just didn’t stick out to us.”

There is no mystery, in his view, about why he successfully crossed the chasm from child star to adult professional without zigzagging (save for one DUI charge when he was 18) into expected tragedy. It is about the parts of his upbringing, in and around Glendale, California, that do resemble everyone else’s: his tight-knit family and education – half of it in public school. Post-Oscars (where he lost the supporting actor statue to Michael Caine), he ran cross-country, started a band, made the dean’s list, went to homecoming dances and became obsessed with baseball. Osment still makes a spring training pilgrimage every year with his high school buddies, almost none of whom are in the entertainment industry.

As a boy, he did movie and TV work largely in the summers, often accompanied by his father, Michael Osment, who himself started as an actor and operated a Los Angeles theatre in the ‘80s. His mother, Theresa Osment, a career educator, is still a beloved teacher in the Glendale school system. She taught him and his younger sister, actress Emily Osment, to read early, with the byproduct that they navigated scripts better than their peers, he said.

And their father, who eventually transitioned into construction, painstakingly went over every audition and screenplay with them, said Emily Osment, who started acting at age 5. “He is the most, sometimes infuriatingly, patient person I’ve ever met in my life,” she said. “We would go line by line, word by word. What does this mean? How do you show this? How does your body feel? What is your brain doing? It was such an education on knowing yourself,” and it shows up in her brother’s work. “That’s why Haley’s so specific.”

He studied experimental theatre at New York University, and lived in the city for about 15 years, initially with roommates; he returned early this summer for a cameo in a college buddy’s queer-camp-horror anthology of one-act plays, which Osment mentioned as nonchalantly as if he’d just helped someone move.

His family didn’t valorise his achievements on-screen over other childhood pursuits. When her parents and brother went to the Oscars, “I was just excited that I got to have the babysitter to myself,” said Emily Osment. “I got to order pizza and watch movies. That was fun for me.”

Emily, who recently wrapped Young Sheldon and starred in Hannah Montana alongside Miley Cyrus, had a bumpier childhood stardom experience, as her brother has acknowledged. “I was on the biggest children’s show in the world for five years and trying to go to a normal high school – it was a disaster,” she said, adding that the industry is “meaner for women”.

If there is a stumper in the Osments’ path to fame, it may be why such a grounded family ended up in a notoriously unstable business at all. But this, too, Haley Joel Osment met with equanimity. “I found the job of having a camera really close to your face” – with gear and crew around – “and being able to block all that out and pretend like you’re either alone or just with one other person – I found that a really interesting challenge and such an exciting place to be,” he said. His performance superpower was being focused.

“When he walked on the set, everyone got quiet,” Shyamalan said, “because he was all in. There was no kidding around, nothing. He would sit in the corner and he was completely in character,” even before the director said “Action”.

They discussed the part alongside Osment’s father. “The main thing I talked to him about was, you can choose anything for the character except self-pity,” Shyamalan said. “So you can be scared. You can be angry, you can be active, you can use humour. But you have to fight your fears and you cannot feel bad for yourself. And he totally understood that.”

Osment remembers being in a condo in Philadelphia, where The Sixth Sense was shot, staring out his bedroom window at the city skyline and, for research, absorbing fear-inducing, previously forbidden movies like Alien and Poltergeist. But he understood that Sixth Sense was ultimately not about ghosts or jump-scares. “It’s about perhaps the most frightening thing of all – not being able to communicate to people that you care about,” he said, adding, “I think that’s its most enduring legacy.”

His own standing in the industry isn’t something Osment spends much time on. “He just doesn’t seem very showbizzy to me,” said his friend Scott Aukerman, host of Comedy Bang! Bang!, the mock talk-show podcast and TV series on which Osment appeared as a loopy hanger-on. Unlike other stars who made cameos, Aukerman said, Osment never looked down on the material or what he was being asked to do. “I think he was in a romance with a mermaid. It was just total stupidity,” Aukerman said.

Osment is a comedy nerd, a game podcast guest and an Upright Citizens Brigade monologuist. And, his sister bragged, “he has one of the best pratfalls I’ve ever seen. He was just over at my house, and he did it in the kitchen for us.” He’s also a music obsessive. “He’s always texting me Spotify links, as well as pictures of his dog in the middle of the night,” Aukerman said. (Osment has two jealous mutts, Dorothy and Betty.)

Especially after seeing the 35-year-old Kravitz at the helm of her own movie – and thinking back to the 29-year-old Shyamalan gambling on The Sixth Sense – Osment now has ambitions to write and direct.

Until then, he has found contentment right where he is. “The career path as an actor is like, you can kind of just keep doing it until you drop dead one day, which is what I’d like to do,” he said. The life is worthwhile, he said, simply if people enjoy his work. “If they have a good night watching this movie at home with friends or family, that makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Melena Ryzik

Photographs by: Devin Oktar Yalkin

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