Remember the Little Boy in The Sixth Sense? Here’s What Haley Joel Osment Looks Like 27 Years Later
There is a scene in The Sixth Sense where a small boy leans toward Bruce Willis in the dark and whispers four words that instantly became some of the most quoted in cinema history.
“I see dead people.”
Haley Joel Osment was eleven years old when he delivered that line, and he delivered it so perfectly that it earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor — making him, at the time, the second-youngest performer ever nominated in that category.
The story of what he did next is one of the more quietly remarkable tales of child stardom navigated with unusual intelligence and integrity.
He Was Already Working at Age Four
Haley Joel Osment was born on April 10, 1988, in Los Angeles, California, the son of a teacher and a theater and film actor, both originally from Birmingham, Alabama.
His parents deliberately gave him what they described as a “good old-fashioned Southern upbringing” — one grounded in family, faith, and education, despite the fact that they lived in the heart of the entertainment industry.
At age four, during a visit to a store, Osment was approached by a talent scout.
He was asked to describe the biggest thing he had ever seen.
He described an IMAX theater screen.
It won him an audition — and then a Pizza Hut commercial — and a career had begun.
By age six, he had appeared in a small role in Forrest Gump (1994) as Tom Hanks’ son, little Forrest Gump Jr.
By age seven, he was appearing in guest roles on Walker, Texas Ranger, Touched by an Angel, Chicago Hope, and The Larry Sanders Show.
He became a series regular on Murphy Brown in its final season, replacing another child actor as Murphy’s son Avery.
He was, in short, a seasoned professional years before most children have started elementary school.
The Film That Changed Everything
The Sixth Sense opened in August 1999 and became one of the most discussed, debated, and rewatched films of the decade.
M. Night Shyamalan’s psychological thriller follows a child psychologist — played by Bruce Willis — who begins treating a deeply troubled eight-year-old boy named Cole Sear who is terrified by what he alone can see.
The film earned six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and became the second-highest-grossing film of 1999.
Osment was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards simultaneously.
He lost the Oscar to Michael Caine — and later worked with Caine in Secondhand Lions (2003), a film many consider one of his most underrated performances.
“I heard from Bruce a lot after it came out in those subsequent years,” Osment said in a 2024 interview. “He’d leave voicemails at the house from time to time, just checking in.”
The Filmography That Followed
The years immediately after The Sixth Sense confirmed that Osment’s performance had not been a fluke.
In 2000, he starred in Pay It Forward alongside Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt, playing a boy whose school assignment to think of an idea to change the world sets off a chain of unexpected consequences.
In 2001, Steven Spielberg cast him as the lead of A.I. Artificial Intelligence — a demanding, complex role as a robot child programmed to love — opposite Jude Law.
The film required him to sustain a single emotional register across an extraordinarily difficult two-hour performance, and he did it with a technical precision that astonished adult co-stars and crew members alike.
Also in 2003, he starred in Secondhand Lions opposite Robert Duvall and Michael Caine, earning warm reviews as a boy sent to spend a summer with two eccentric elderly uncles.
Before he turned sixteen, he had worked with Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt, Jude Law, Robert Duvall, Michael Caine, and Steven Spielberg.
The Deliberate Pause
When Osment was old enough to consider college, he did something that surprised many people who had followed his career.
He enrolled at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, moved to New York City, and spent four years genuinely studying experimental theater.
He graduated in 2011 — and spent the following years slowly, deliberately rebuilding his relationship with acting on his own terms.
“Those were pretty tense years in terms of how celebrity was in Los Angeles,” he said of the late 2000s tabloid era. “I wanted to make sure this is what I wanted to do and focus in purely on the craft and not the business side of it.”
He lived in New York City for more than a decade.
He did theater.
He stayed largely out of the entertainment press.
And when he came back, he came back differently — as a character actor willing to go to strange, uncomfortable, funny places that no one would have predicted for the boy from The Sixth Sense.
The Adult Career He Built from Scratch
Haley Joel Osment’s adult filmography is a deliberate demolition of expectations.
He appeared in Kevin Smith’s body horror film Tusk (2014).
He played himself in the Entourage film (2015) in a comedic supporting role.
He turned up in What We Do in the Shadows, Wednesday, and The Kominsky Method — the latter alongside his sister Emily Osment, who is also a successful actress.
He voiced Sora, the lead character in the beloved Kingdom Hearts video game franchise, across multiple titles spanning more than two decades — an ongoing creative relationship with that character that his fans have followed with genuine devotion.
In 2024, he appeared in Blink Twice, directed by Zoë Kravitz, alongside Channing Tatum and Naomi Ackie.
In 2025, he appeared in Happy Gilmore 2 and as a guest in season two of Peacock’s acclaimed Poker Face.
It is the career of someone who has taken genuine risks and built something real rather than simply coasting on a famous childhood.
What Haley Joel Osment Looks Like Now
Haley Joel Osment is 36 years old, and he looks like a compact, bearded, quietly confident adult who has thought seriously about who he is and what he wants.
The round-faced, wide-eyed boy from Cole Sear’s bedroom is recognizable somewhere in there — but the adult is clearly his own person.
2025 has been a difficult year personally: his home in Altadena, California was destroyed in the January 2025 Eaton Fire, one of the devastating Southern California wildfires that displaced thousands of residents.
He navigated those challenges publicly, with characteristic understated resilience.
“It’s still a job that I really enjoy, despite all the uncertainty and the difficulty of being able to plan your life three to six months out,” he said in a 2024 interview about acting. “When my parents first started me out in this industry, they said, ‘If it’s ever not fun, you can quit tomorrow.’ It’s still fun.”
What Haley Joel Osment Has Been Up to Since The Sixth Sense
Here is a look at his biggest milestones in the 27 years since Cole Sear first saw dead people:
- 1999: Delivered one of the most technically accomplished child performances in Hollywood history in The Sixth Sense, earning simultaneous nominations for the Oscar, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actor at age eleven.
- 2000: Starred in Pay It Forward opposite Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt, demonstrating that his Sixth Sense performance was no one-time achievement — and that he could hold his own in any dramatic company Hollywood put him in.
- 2001: Was cast by Steven Spielberg as the lead of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a technically grueling science fiction film that demanded a sustained, emotionally complex performance across two-plus hours — a challenge he met in a way that impressed everyone who worked on the film.
- 2001: Became the original voice of Sora in the first Kingdom Hearts video game for PlayStation 2, a creative partnership with the franchise that he has maintained across multiple titles over more than two decades.
- 2003: Starred in Secondhand Lions opposite Robert Duvall and Michael Caine — a small, warm film that remains one of his most beloved performances and demonstrated his ability to share the screen with two of the most seasoned actors alive.
- 2007: Enrolled at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he studied experimental theater — stepping completely away from Hollywood to figure out, on his own terms, whether acting was genuinely the life he wanted to build.
- 2011: Graduated from NYU’s Tisch School and returned to acting, beginning the slow, deliberate work of building an adult career that he controlled rather than one defined by the expectations surrounding his extraordinary childhood.
- 2014–2019: Built a distinctive adult filmography through eclectic, risk-taking choices — appearing in Kevin Smith’s Tusk, the Entourage film, and the Zac Efron–led Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile — each role a deliberate statement that he was not interested in simply reprising his past.
- 2022–2024: Continued voicing Sora in Kingdom Hearts, appeared in Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie, and joined the cast of Zoë Kravitz’s critically praised Blink Twice alongside Channing Tatum — one of his highest-profile adult film roles to date.
- 2025: Appeared in Happy Gilmore 2, guest-starred in season two of Poker Face on Peacock, and navigated the loss of his home in the Eaton Fire wildfires — a year that tested him personally even as his professional resurgence continued to gather momentum.