Haley Joel Osment has shared the touching manner in which Bruce Willis, his The Sixth Sense co-star, maintained contact with him over the years.
The duo appeared together in the iconic 1999 film, a horror/thriller that remains beloved today.
Willis took on the role of Dr. Malcolm Crowe, while a ten-year-old Osment portrayed Cole Sear, a troubled child who possesses the ability to communicate with the dead.
This role not only earned Osment an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but it also sparked a long-lasting friendship with Willis. The Die Hard star kept in touch with Osment in the years that followed.
In a recent interview with Variety, Osment shared: “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’.”
Elaborating on Willis’s thoughtful gestures, 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.”
In the same interview, Osment reflected on what it was like to work with Willis at such a young age in The Sixth Sense.
He said: “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.”
Osment went on to describe how Willis would handle everything with ‘cool’ charisma, an impression that is hardly surprising.
He commented: “It was a script that we all cared about so much and put so much effort into, and Bruce led the way on that.”
This revelation follows Osment’s heartfelt tribute to Willis on Instagram in 2022, after the actor was diagnosed with aphasia, a condition that impairs cognitive abilities, particularly affecting language, speech, reading, writing, and listening.