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. 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 wi.