Haley Joel Osment Reveals the 'Inspiring' Lesson He Got from “Sixth Sense” Costar Bruce Willis (Exclusive)

“I carry with me a lot of the things I learned from Bruce,” says the actor, who stars in the new thriller 'Blink Twice'

When Haley Joel Osment filmed the 1999 thriller The Sixth Sense, he was a largely unknown child actor who’d had smaller roles in films like Forrest Gump. His costar, Bruce Willis, was a global superstar with hits like Die Hard and Armageddon under his belt.

However, Willis saw Osment as a peer.

“He's always going to be what a movie star is in my mind,” Osment, now 36, tells PEOPLE. “And having that charisma and gravitas, and being able to come onto a set and to work with a 10-year-old, and to be really generous with his time — I got very lucky.”

He says Willis, 69, never behaved in a condescending way — and both Willis and director M. Night Shyamalan “really treated me as an equal,” he recalls.

“To see someone like Bruce do that, that's really been inspiring to me. That whatever position you have in the industry, everybody is on the same page,” adds Osment.

Related: Zo? Kravitz Directs Fiancé Channing Tatum as a Billionaire with a Killer Island in Blink Twice Trailer

“I carry with me a lot of the things that I learned from Bruce into the stuff that I do today,” he says. “It was one of the best experiences I've had as an actor.”

Willis has stayed out of the public eye since 2022, when his family disclosed he was diagnosed with aphasia. A year later, they said his condition had progressed, and he received a diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia.

Osment — who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his work in the supernatural mystery about a boy who utters the famous phrase, “I see dead people” — has had a prolific career since The Sixth Sense made a splash 25 years ago.

He went on to star in movies like Steven Spielberg’s 2001 sci-fi movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence and shows like Silicon Valley and the upcoming season of the Netflix series Wednesday.

In his latest movie, Blink Twice, a thriller about abuse of power directed by Zo? Kravitz, he plays a struggling actor who joins his friend, tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) on a trip to the mogul’s private island. To say the men behave badly is quite an understatement.

The movie has some major surprises — and Osment says working on The Sixth Sense, which has one of the biggest twists in modern movie history, helped him understand the notion of spoilers.

Related: Haley Joel Osment Keeps Bruce Willis 'Very Close' to His Heart 25 Years After The Sixth Sense

“I think we knew not to give away the ending, but there wasn't a lot of heat around it, like this was some secret we had to protect,” he says. “It was just in the normal course of, ‘It's a thriller. We don't want to tell people what happened in the end.’ ”

“When the movie took off beyond our wildest expectations, that was one of the first times I remember having an experience of there being a spoiler that needed to be protected,” he says. “So yeah, I think I have a long tradition of not revealing things.”

Indeed, he’s tight-lipped when it comes to Wednesday, the series starring Jenna Ortega as the moody Addams Family daughter.

“I am legally prohibited from saying anything,” says Osment. “I love getting these periodic emails that Netflix sends. It's like, ‘Just a reminder, be careful where you're taking pictures with your phone,’ and all these things. It's very, very secretive. But it's going to be an amazing season.”

After that, Osment says he’d like to transition from acting into directing, like Kravitz. “That is the biggest thing at the top of my list right now, is to move into getting behind the camera,” he says. “Watching Zo? do what she did so successfully — it was very, very inspiring.”

Blink Twice is in theaters Aug. 23.

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