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, .