The Sixth Sense star Haley Joel Osment reveals sweet way Bruce Willis kept in touch with him over the years
Haley Joel Osment was just ten when he featured in a movie with Bruce Willis
Haley Joel Osment has revealed the sweet way his The Sixth Sense co-star Bruce Willis kept him touch with him over the years.
The pair starred together in the iconic 1999 movie, a horror/thriller that is very much still loved to this day.
Willis starred as Dr. Malcolm Crowe, while a then ten-year-old Osment played Cole Sear, a troubled child who is given the power to communicate with the dead.
Not only did the role lead to Osment earning an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor, it also lead to a decades-long friendship between him and Willis, with the Die Hard actor keeping in touch in the years that followed.
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Speaking to Variety in a new interview, Osment said: "I heard from [Willis] a lot after it [the film] 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'."
Discussing further the heartwarming way Willis would keep in touch, Osment added: "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."
Elsewhere in the interview, Osment spoke on what it was like working with Willis from such a young age in The Sixth Sense.
He continued: "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."
The actor went on to say Willis would do everything in such a 'cool way' and had quite the 'charisma', and to be honest that's hardly a surprise.
"It was a script that we all cared about so much and put so much effort into, and Bruce led the way on that," Osment concluded.
This comes after Osment paid a touching tribute to Willis on Instagram in 2022 following the actor's devastating diagnosis with aphasia, a condition that affects a person's cognitive abilities - specifically impacting their language and speech and causing problems with reading, writing and listening.
Topics: Bruce Willis, Hollywood, Film and TV
Callum Jones