Child star of The Sixth Sense Haley Joel Osment changed his look in attempt 'to hide in public'

Haley Joel Osment was an acclaimed child actor in movies like The Sixth Sense, but later he would do his best to “hide in public”.

Acting is an incredibly difficult craft to master yet some child stars have achieved greatness at a fascinatingly young age. When contemplating the great child actors, names like Macaulay Culkin (Home Alone), Dakota Fanning (Man On Fire), Emma Watson (Harry Potter), and Tatum O’Neal (Paper Moon) are cited for good reason. At the head of the conversation, you’ll often find the name Haley Joel Osment. He was celebrated as a breakout talent for the 1999 M. Night Shyamalan thriller The Sixth Sense, and yes, he’s still in movies…

Haley Joel Osment grew beard to ‘try to hide in public’

After his first role as Forrest Gump Jr. in the 1994 Tom Hanks classic, the young actor was just 10 years old when working on The Sixth Sense, in which he starred alongside Bruce Willis as a troubled boy with the ability to see the dead.

The acclaim opened up the doors to opportunities in such big movies as Pay It Forward and A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

What happened to him? you may hear people ask when discussing films now and then, and the answer is he’s still acting. After years in the spotlight as a child, at the age of 18, he relocated from Los Angeles to study experimental theatre at New York University in 2006. It was during these days that the stream of high-profile film releases simmered down.

“I did work that practically nobody saw for a long time, which was not a great career move –
but, ultimately, was important for me to figure out whether this was what I truly wanted to do for the rest of my life,” he explained during an interview with The Guardian.

For example, he debuted on Broadway in 2008 playing the role of a drug addict in a reimagining of David Mamet’s American Buffalo. Following his graduation, he would continue to tackle challenging roles that distanced himself further from the image his previous work had sculpted for him.

His work throughout the 2010s includes movies from Entourage to the Ted Bundy biopic Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil And Vile starring Zac Efron. “That was definitely a very fun period of playing a lot of bad guys,” he recalled.

It was during this time that he attempted to change his image to set himself apart from his child star days, and even grew a beard in hopes he could “try to hide in public.” Was it a success?

“That didn’t really work at all,” he admits.

What has Haley Joel Osment been up to recently?

In the 2020s, Haley starred on live-action shows like the TV drama Goliath (he played Dylan Zax) with Billy Bob Thornton and the vampire comedy What We Do In The Shadows (Topher Delmonico).

There has also been an assortment of voicing acting roles, from Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous to Young Jedi Adventures.

As for movies, he was in the 2023 rom-com Somebody I Used To Know on Prime Video, with his latest role being in the 2024 crime-comedy Drugstore June. Looking ahead, he’ll be in Zoë Kravitz’s directorial feature debut Blink Twice, a thriller about a waitress traveling to a tech mogul’s private island that stars Channing Tatum.

“I just feel lucky that I’m able to do something that I’ve done since I was a very young age,” he previously told The Independent, “and continue to have that be my job today.”