Haley Joel Osment Says Bruce Willis Called Him for Years to Check in After The Sixth Sense: ‘It Made a Huge Impression’

“He’d leave voicemails at the house from time to time, just checking in,” Osment told ‘Entertainment Weekly’ while celebrating the film’s 25th anniversary

Haley Joel Osment is speaking fondly of his former The Sixth Sense costar Bruce Willis.  In a new interview celebrating the 25th anniversary of the 1999 thriller, Osment, 36, revealed that Willis, 69, regularly called to check in on him in the years after the pair famously worked together on the film. “I heard from [Bruce] a lot after it came out in those subsequent years,” Osment told Entertainment Weekly. “He’d leave voicemails at the house from time to time, just checking in.”

“He would just call out of the blue … in the lead-up before travel. We went to Japan together twice … to open The Sixth Sense in different cities,” he added. “So [Bruce] 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.’ ”

Osment was just 10 years old when he starred opposite Willis as psychologist Malcolm Crowe in M. Night Shamalayan’s global hit. He said of working with the iconic actor, “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,” Osment continued. “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.”
Willis’ family announced in March 2022 that he had been diagnosed with aphasia, a language disorder “impacting his cognitive abilities,” and was “stepping away” from his acting career as a result.

Osment told EW that he hasn’t been in touch with Willis following his diagnosis. “I know his daughters a little bit, but I have not spoken to him since the news of his health in recent years,” he said, referring to Willis’ oldest daughters: Rumer, Scout and Tallulah Willis.

Speaking further about working with the Die Hard star, 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 No. 1 on the call sheet.

“It was a script that we all cared about so much and put so much effort into, and Bruce led the way on that,” he added. The Sixth Sense is available to stream now.