Haley Joel Osment: ‘There’s an expectation for darkness in child stardom’

Twenty years after his star-making turn in ‘The Sixth Sense’, the Oscar nominee talks to Adam White about surviving early fame, living an ordinary life and playing opposite Zac Efron’s Ted Bundy

'Playing the villain can sometimes be a little bit more interesting than playing somebody on the straight-and-narrow' (Michael Buckner/Deadline/Shutterstock)

For a brief time around the turn of the millennium, Haley Joel Osment was inescapable. His speciality was in playing earnest and haunted little boys – the isolated loner who could see dead people in The Sixth Sense, the cyborg child in Steven Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence, or the plucky youngster determined to change the world for the better in Pay It Forward. Then he more or less disappeared. Yet it was not due to the destructive pressures of fame that have been the undoing of so many child stars. He didn’t break down or cause a public spectacle. He crashed his car, once, but paid the fine with no special pleading. In fact, relatively speaking, his was a quite straightforward upbringing.

“I think sometimes there’s an expectation for there to be that darkness,” the actor, now 31, explains. “But I think there are a lot more stories of people who had positive experiences working as children and didn’t have that kind of cliched storyline going forward. And that’s been the case for me.”

Osment’s drama-free journey from popular child star to stable, employed adult actor is far more common than the alternative, but he’s right. It’s the worst examples of post-fame frailty that linger in pop culture memory – the child stars that never escaped typecasting, or went off the rails amid gossip and scandal.

“I realise that I’m very lucky,” Osment concedes, “because there were other kids who maybe didn’t have parents that looked out for them, or worked on film sets that were not wholesome, or where they were not protected. But that was not my experience.”

Osment with Lily Collins in ‘Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile’ (Voltage Pictures)

Osment has also achieved something that even the most talented former child star would find tricky: he’s been able to disappear. In the chilling Ted Bundy docudrama Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, his character is a rare element of kind-hearted virtue – a compassionate co-worker of Bundy’s trapped girlfriend Liz (Lily Collins). This guy, Jerry, is hopelessly in love with her and deeply concerned about her devotion to her sinister new beau.

Zac Efron understandably earned the lion’s share of attention for his sneaky, slippery lead performance as Bundy – a provocative career left-turn if there ever was one. But the film marks something of a departure for Osment, too. In the decade since he returned to acting from a self-imposed hiatus, he has cornered the market in playing very bad guys, specifically mean manchildren or weirdoes, in things like Silicon Valley, Future Man and the Entourage movie. He’s marvellous at doing so, but it’s also welcome to see him play the opposite once again.

“I think a lot of actors will tell you that some of the most fun you can have is diverting expectations, and playing the villain can sometimes be a little bit more interesting than playing somebody on the straight-and-narrow,” he explains. “But it works both ways too. After doing a run of villains and things like that, it’s nice to change up the routine and to play someone a bit more on the good side. And it’s a little less taxing.”

Osment is one of three former child stars who headline Extremely Wicked: Collins started out playing plucky teenage daughters (eg in The Blind Side), and Efron, of course, was an escapee from the Walt Disney factory. But while Efron always embodied a hunk-in-training, a non-threatening boy for pre-teen girls to lust after, Osment was a “serious child actor” in the young Jodie Foster mould. He also rarely acted alongside other children, tending to share the screen with men much older than himself: Michael Caine, Jude Law, Bruce Willis. It wasn’t a deliberate star persona, Osment says today, but it did make his off-screen existence much easier.

Osment alongside Bruce Willis in 1999’s star-making ‘The Sixth Sense’ (Getty)

“It intruded less on my personal life that I wasn’t in things that were being watched by my age rank,” he says. “So going back to school, it wasn’t like I was on a show that everybody at school was watching at the same time, and I think it made the growing-up process a little bit easier. Even going back to sixth grade after The Sixth Sense, that was a movie that my classmates were too young to see.”

It would have been harder, he says, if he were a teen idol like Efron, or someone like his younger sister Emily, who found fame as one of the stars of Hannah Montana. “Being on those shows that were hugely popular with their own age groups, I think there’s a lot more pressure and a lot more scrutiny, so I admire them both for coming through it,” he says.

Today Osment is respectful and friendly, if careful with his words, and has an upbeat sense of ease when it comes to talking about his life and career. Considering he’d have every right to get visibly frustrated by yet another journalist endlessly asking him questions about things he did 20 years ago, it’s quite remarkable.

The way Osment describes his early fame sounds almost blissful. He says he had no idea of the “craziness” surrounding the making of AI at the time, from the ironclad secrecy Spielberg imposed on set (in tribute to the film’s famously discreet producer Stanley Kubrick, who died shortly before production) to the fact that no cast member received a full script. As for competition with other child stars at the time – the likes of Jonathan Lipnicki or Alex D Linz – it doesn’t sound like things got too nasty outside the audition room.

“That was never my mentality with it,” he explains. “And that wasn’t the way that my parents were either. Their line on things was: ‘You could quit and go back to school any day you want when this stops being fun’, so it was very little pressure and very little feeling of competition through all of that. For me it was always sort of a strange adventure.”

In addition to his parents, Osment credits Spielberg with keeping him grounded. “There’s a lot of amazing things about Steven, but one of them is the effort that goes into him staying in contact with all the people that he’s worked with,” he says. “I mean, getting birthday cards and graduation notes and speaking with him over the phone in the years since we worked together. He really does take a great interest in how the lives of his young performers go on. It’s led to a pretty good record with the [young] actors that he’s worked with.”

That Osment stepped out of the limelight in 2003, when his young movie career was still thriving, similarly speaks to the nous of his support network. What followed was a relatively ordinary teenage life, with money trickling in via Osment’s voiceover role in the wildly successful video game franchise Kingdom Hearts. The character of sword-wielding Sora remains the part Osment has played for the longest, even if many outside of its devoted following would have no idea he was involved with it.

A six-year-old Osment with Tom Hanks in ‘Forrest Gump’, 1994 (Paramount/Kobal/Rex) (Paramount/Kobal/REX)

“I remember I was doing a play in Philadelphia a couple of years ago,” Osment says, “and once a week they’d have a school come in and see a matinee of the show and have a talk-back after, and every single question was, ‘When’s Kingdom Hearts 3 coming out?’ I was surprised that kids would even know that I was connected to the game, to be honest. I’m just doing the voiceover work for it, so my connection to it is basically me in a recording booth with the director and some of the producers in a little studio in Burbank. But it’s one of the most unique things I’ve ever been involved with.”

After high school, and still eager to act, Osment enrolled in an experimental theatre programme at New York University. There were more conventional courses available, he says, but ones that he felt wouldn’t teach him anything he hadn’t learned on movie sets already. After all, he had played the young son of Forrest Gump when he was just six and already had an Oscar nomination, for The Sixth Sense, by the age of 11.

“This felt like something new and a completely different way of performing,” he explains. “Some programmes try and break down your previous habits and completely remake you as a different performer, but this one was more about taking what you know and setting it aside and then finding this new way of getting into the performance, and I learned a lot.”

Upon graduation, he eased back into theatre, film and television. He says he deliberately avoided what could be considered “stunt casting”, and has since become a regular presence in alternative comedy, appearing in shows including Drunk History, Comedy Bang! Bang! and the surreal Will Ferrell/Kristen Wiig series The Spoils of Babylon and The Spoils Before Dying. Comedy super-producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are additionally big fans, casting Osment against type in darkly comic superhero series Future Man and, most recently, The Boys.

It’s in the latter that Osment embodies the kind of person he could have been if things went awry. On one level he is Mesmer, a superhero able to “read” people’s thoughts and emotions. But in the universe of The Boys, he’s also a celebrity has-been, signing autographs at conventions alongside the likes of Billy Zane and Tara Reid, who both gamely play themselves. Taking such a role was a brave move – one that proved his ability to laugh at himself, but also a subtle nod to the fact that his fallen status on the series is far removed from where Osment is in reality.

“I just feel lucky that I’m able to do something that I’ve done since I was a very young age and continue to have that be my job today,” he says.

You can’t help but believe him.

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile is available now on DVD, Blu-ray and digital download