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Former child star Haley Joel Osment has shared a touching tradition Bruce Willis kept up in the years after The Sixth Sense.
Osment, who is set to guest star in a huge Netflix show in 2025, appeared in M Night Shyamalan’s 1999 film when he was just 11, and became one of the youngest actors to ever be nominated for an Oscar.
While Osment’s film career started five years earlier, when he appeared in Forrest Gump, it was The Sixth Sense that saw him receive intense media attention. Fortunately, though, he had strong support in the form of his co-star Willis, who was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in 2023.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Osment, who is now 36, said: “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.”
The actor continued: “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.’”
The actor said he would like “to find those old answering tapes” as he knows “we preserved those”.
Osment said that, while he had worked with Tom Hanks on Forrest Gump, Willis was “the first gigantic celebrity that I’d worked with at an age where I was aware of his stardom”.
Reflecting on working relationship, Osment, said: “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 number on on the call sheet.”
Osment said he has “not spoken to” Willis “since the news of his health in recent years”.
It was first revealed in March 2022 that Bruce Willis had been diagnosed with aphasia, a language disorder caused by brain damage that can lead to difficulties comprehending, speaking, reading or writing.
Last year, his daughter Rumer provided an update in which she explained he had received a “more specific” diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a “rare and aggressive” form of the disease.
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FTD is an umbrella term for a group of dementias that mainly affect the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain which are responsible for such things as personality, behaviour, language and speech, according to Dementia UK.
