“Sometimes I see dead” is one of the most recognized phrases in the history of cinema (44 according to the AFI). And he wouldn’t have been the same without a child, covered up to his neck in the blanket, whispering. That kid was none other than Haley Joel Osment, who at eleven years old had already appeared in two Oscar-nominated films (one of them a winner) and whose wake vanished as soon as it came. Surely you have asked yourself more than once: What happened to Haley Joel Osment?
Double performance with pepperoni
Haley Joel Osment was born in Los Angeles on April 10, 1988 (to save you the bills, he is now 34 years old) from the marriage of a teacher and a second-rate theater actor. When he was a baby, Michael Eugene, his father, he refused to speak to her as if she were, using long, coherent sentences. And it explains a lot about what happened next.
At the age of four, Osment was discovered in a store by a scout and signed by a talent agency with which he made ads for Kraft cheese or a new rectangular pizza from Pizza Hut called Bigfoot. I would go out for a second and have a sentence, but it became a little phenomenon. In 1994, he was already co-starring in a sitcom (‘Thunder Alley’) and landed a role as Tom Hanks’ son in a small movie that may sound like: ‘Forrest Gump’.
In 1994, ‘Forrest Gump’ absolutely won everything, catapulting Haley Joel Osment to worldwide fame. At the age of six, he was raffled off in all the series, from ‘Ally McBeal’ to ‘Murphy Brown’ through ‘Walker Texas Ranger’ or ‘Chicago Hope’. He starred in movies with Whoopi Goldberg (the video store classic ‘Bogus’) and then a casting call came up for which he had certain options: a mystery film with Bruce Willis as the protagonist.
Without sense
Haley Joel Osment went to the last casting of ‘The Sixth Sense’ wearing a tie and a suit: he was the only boy who did it and he stood out from all the others immediately. As she entered, M. Night Shyamalan asked her if she had read her part of her script. “Three Times Last Night”the boy replied. Shyamalan was impressed, but he wasn’t referring to his part of the script: he was referring to the entire script. He impressed the director so much that, despite the fact that he was not convinced by his angelic appearance, he had no choice but to surrender to the evidence: I already had a new protagonist.
A few months later, he was wearing a tie again, but for something else: He was nominated for an Oscar at just eleven years old. He wasn’t the youngest actor to get the nomination (it was Justin Henry when he was eight for ‘Kramer vs. Kramer’) but he was already the hottest new star in Hollywood. He didn’t win but he began to get used to awards: he was nominated for about twenty.
He got something less after his role in ‘Artificial Intelligence’, Kubrick’s dream project that Steven Spielberg finished. The movie may not have been perfect, but Osment outshone the film’s mistakes. It became his favorite role, he got compliments from all over the world, and then… nothing. Haley Joel Osment was thirteen years old and had already reached the peak of her career.
Donald, but cure me at once
After some roles as a voice actor in direct-to-video Disney sequels (‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame 2’, ‘The Jungle Book 2’), in 2003, when she turned 15, Haley Joel Osment disappeared from the face of the earth. He would not return to the cinema, except for a small film, ‘Home of the giants’, until seven years later. During that time, the actor prepared for the University and he ended up graduating with honors in New York, where he decided to grow a beard to go unnoticed. Hollywood had forgotten about him, his attempt as a theater actor had not succeeded (in David Mamet’s ‘American Buffalo’) and succeeding again in the cinema seemed unthinkable.
And yet, he began to choose not the roles that would bring him immediate fame, but the ones you wanted. He worked with Kevin Smith on ‘Tusk’ and the (unfairly) hated ‘Yoga Hosers’, laughed at himself in ‘Entourage’, did a season of the cult show ‘Comedy! Bang! Bang!’ and discovered a paper that has helped him pay the bills from 2002 until now: that of Sora, the protagonist of ‘Kingdom Hearts’, the video game saga as vast as it is impossible to explain with which it has even reached ‘Super Smash Bros’.
In 2019 he got a role in ‘Extremely cruel, evil and perverse’ that made people recognize him again, and little by little he has made his way between a very different world of cinema whom I knew He got roles in ‘Future man’, ‘The Kominsky method’ or ‘What we do in the shadows’ and faces a not promising future, but a solvent one.
He says he’s been in love with acting for thirty years and that’s why he keeps trying. Yes, has had an altercation with the police and was even sentenced to go to Alcoholics Anonymous after hitting it with his car drunk in 2006 (something he has accepted in various interviews), but it is still normal in the Mecca of Cinema. And yes, it is possible his sister, Emily Osment, is more famous than him after his role in ‘Hannah Montana,’ but he’s not worried about it.
In the end, few things define him better than this sentence of his: “I’m not interested in the business of promoting myself. I don’t care if people know who I am or what is being said about me. I’m just here to do a job.” Fortunately, sometimes he no longer sees his career as dead.