Haley Joel Osment remembers Bruce Willis’ leadership on and the twist of The Sixth Sense

It’s been 25 years since Haley Joel Osment saw dead people in The Sixth Sense. While Osment had a small role in Forrest Gump prior, would go on to work with Steven Spielberg and later be a welcome face in movies and TV, nothing could or will top The Sixth Sense. And so for the occasion, he remembers working with Bruce Willis and the movie’s famous twist.

Sitting down with Entertainment Weekly, Haley Joel Osment said that Bruce Willis was everything he had imagined and more on the set of The Sixth Sense. “It was fantastic…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. And 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.” That’s pretty awesome to hear, especially since Willis was only put in The Sixth Sense because of the Broadway Brawler debacle. Osment also added that Willis continued his good graces even after filming wrapped. “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.’ I need to find those old answering tapes. I know we preserved those.”

But let’s face it: it’s difficult to talk about The Sixth Sense without talking about its ending, in which it’s revealed that Willis’ Malcolm Crowe has been dead the whole time, another one of the “dead people” that Osment’s Cole sees throughout the film. But unlike in some scenarios, those within the industry were pretty tight-lipped. “It’s also kind of remarkable that a lot of people read that script and the twist was not so widely known, and had not been spoiled by people who had had access to it before. We didn’t have to shoot any fake endings or anything like that to throw people off.”

Haley Joel Osment would go on to nab one of The Sixth Sense’s six Academy Award nominations, becoming the second-youngest Best Supporting Actor nominee ever, which holds to this day. While the movie would go home empty-handed, that a horror film was also nominated for Best Picture was still a huge deal. (Go ahead, call it a thriller if that makes you happy; either way, it was a rare feat at the Oscars.)

What do you think the reputation of The Sixth Sense is 25 years on? Does it hold up or was it very much of its time?

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