Haley Joel Osment was regularly called by Bruce Willis after they finished ‘The Sixth Sense’

29 September 2024

Haley Joel Osment was regularly called by Bruce Willis after they starred together in ‘The Sixth Sense’.

Haley Joel Osment was regularly called by Bruce Willis after they starred together in ‘The Sixth Sense’

The now 36-year-old featured in the spooky M Night Shamalayan 1999 hit when he was aged 10, and in an interview to mark the 25th anniversary of the film, Haley has told how his famous co-star, 69, kept checking up on him once they had wrapped the project.

He told Entertainment Weekly: “I heard from (Bruce) a lot after it 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… in the lead-up before travel. We went to Japan together twice … to open ‘The Sixth Sense’ in different cities.

“So (Bruce) 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.’”

Haley added about working with Bruce, who is now stricken with dementia: “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.

“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.”

Bruce’s family announced in 2022 that he had been diagnosed with aphasia – a language disorder impacting his cognitive abilities – which forced him to quit acting.

Haley said about not having been in touch with the ‘Die Hard’ star recently: “I know his daughters a little bit, but I have not spoken to him since the news of his health in recent years.

“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 No1 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.”