What Happened to Haley Joel Osment? Where He Is Now in 2026

Four words. That’s all it took. “I see dead people,” whispered by a wide-eyed little boy in 1999, became one of the most quoted lines in movie history — and turned Haley Joel Osment into the most talked-about child actor on the planet. He earned an Oscar nomination before he was old enough to drive, then seemed to fade from the spotlight as he grew up. So whatever happened to the kid from The Sixth Sense? The answer is more interesting than the usual child-star story: he never really left. Here’s where Haley Joel Osment is in 2026.

01Profile

Full name

Haley Joel Osment

Born

April 10, 1988 (38 years old)

Birthplace

Los Angeles, California, USA

Occupation

Actor, voice actor, producer

Best known for

"The Sixth Sense" (1999), "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" (2001), "Pay It Forward" (2000)

Voice work

Sora in the "Kingdom Hearts" video game series

Family

Younger sister is actress Emily Osment ("Hannah Montana," "Young Sheldon")

Here’s a fun bit of trivia: acting runs in the family. His little sister Emily Osment grew up to be a Disney Channel star and now headlines the sitcom “Young Sheldon” spinoff. The Osment siblings have quietly been working actors for almost three decades between them.

02The Rise: The Boy Who Could Act

A Hollywood kid from the start

Osment was born in Los Angeles to a teacher mother and an actor father, and he started working young. By age six he’d landed a small but memorable role as Forrest Gump’s son in the 1994 Best Picture winner — the little boy Tom Hanks worries might have inherited something more than his looks. That part earned him a Young Artist Award and got casting directors paying attention.

Through the mid-’90s he popped up in TV shows and movies as the reliable, unusually natural kid actor. But nothing could have prepared anyone for what came next.

”I see dead people”

In 1999, M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” became a cultural earthquake. As Cole Sear, the troubled boy who can see ghosts, Osment delivered a performance of startling restraint and emotional depth — the kind of work you almost never see from an eleven-year-old. The film was a massive box-office hit, the twist ending became legendary, and that whispered confession to Bruce Willis entered the pop-culture bloodstream forever.

The performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, making him one of the youngest people ever nominated in that category. He lost on the night to Michael Caine, but the nomination alone cemented him as a genuine acting talent, not just a cute kid.

The Spielberg era

Hollywood came calling fast. He starred opposite Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt in “Pay It Forward” (2000), then took on the most demanding role of his young career: the robotic boy David in Steven Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” (2001), a project Spielberg inherited from Stanley Kubrick. Carrying a big-budget science-fiction film on his shoulders, Osment earned a second Saturn Award. He followed it with the warm coming-of-age hit “Secondhand Lions” (2003) alongside Robert Duvall and Michael Caine.

For a stretch around the turn of the millennium, Haley Joel Osment was arguably the most respected child actor in the business.

03Growing Up on Screen

Then came the hardest transition in show business: the leap from child star to adult actor. It’s a chasm a lot of famous kids never cross. Osment took an unusual route — he stepped back and went to school.

• 1994Plays Forrest Gump's son at age six, his first major film role.
• 1999"The Sixth Sense" makes him a global star and earns an Oscar nomination.
• 2000–2003Headlines "Pay It Forward," "A.I. Artificial Intelligence," and "Secondhand Lions."
• 2006Enrolls at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, stepping away from full-time acting to study.
• 2010sReturns as a working adult actor, deliberately choosing offbeat indie and comedy roles over leading-man parts.

Instead of chasing teen-heartthrob roles, Osment chose to study drama at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. It was a deliberate decision to grow up out of the glare and come back as an actor by craft rather than by childhood fame. When he returned to work in his twenties, he wasn’t trying to be a movie star. He was trying to be a character actor — and that, it turned out, suited him perfectly.

04The Character-Actor Reinvention

This is the part of the story a lot of people miss. While casual fans assumed Osment “disappeared,” he’s actually been one of the busiest working actors of his generation — just not as a leading man.

He became a go-to comedic and supporting player, frequently collaborating with writer-director Kevin Smith on films like “Tusk” (2014) and “Yoga Hosers.” He turned up in the satirical comedy “The Spoils of Babylon,” took recurring roles on prestige TV, and built a reputation as a reliable scene-stealer who clearly relishes weird, against-type parts.

He also became a major figure in voice acting. For over two decades, Osment has voiced Sora, the spiky-haired hero of the wildly popular “Kingdom Hearts” video-game franchise — making it the longest-running role of his career and introducing him to a whole new generation of fans who know his voice better than his face. He’s set to continue as Sora in the upcoming “Kingdom Hearts IV.”

“I’m just disappointed that our reality is so much worse and cheesier.” — Haley Joel Osment, reflecting on the 25th anniversary of “A.I.,” 2026

That dry, self-aware sense of humor — comparing the optimistic future of “A.I.” unfavorably to our actual tech-saturated present — is pure adult Osment. He’s an actor who long ago made peace with his iconic kid roles and built something durable on top of them.

05What He Is Doing Now

A run of high-profile TV in 2025

If you’ve been watching prestige TV, you’ve probably seen him recently without realizing it. In 2025 Osment turned up in two of the year’s biggest shows. He played a creepy, matted-hair character in the opening scenes of season two of Tim Burton’s Netflix smash “Wednesday,” and he guest-starred as a thoroughly unpleasant energy-drink pyramid-scheme operator in an episode of Rian Johnson’s “Poker Face” on Peacock. Both roles leaned into his gift for playing oddballs.

A difficult 2025, addressed head-on

The year also brought serious hardship, which Osment has handled publicly and directly. In early 2025 he lost his home in Altadena, California, in the Eaton Fire, and went to live with his sister Emily. Then, on April 8, 2025, he was arrested at the Mammoth Mountain ski area and charged with two misdemeanors — disorderly conduct under the influence and possession of cocaine. Body-camera footage later showed him using antisemitic language toward an officer.

Osment issued an unreserved apology. “I’m absolutely horrified by my behavior,” he said in a statement, calling what he said “disgraceful language” and “nonsensical garbage,” and adding, “I’ve let the Jewish community down and it devastates me.” In June 2025, a California judge sentenced him to a one-year diversion program that, according to reporting, required regular AA meetings and therapy sessions. He has framed the period as a low point he intends to learn from rather than excuse.

Honored, and back to work in 2026

By 2026, Osment was back in front of cameras and audiences. In April, the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival presented him with its Craft in Focus Award, and his new film “How to Date Again” — in which he plays the night manager at the famously kitschy Madonna Inn — had its world premiere there. He also spent roughly a month in Japan at the end of 2025 shooting a still-unannounced project, and he continues his voice work, with the long-running Sora role anchoring his video-game career. The kid from “The Sixth Sense” is, by every public measure, still very much a working actor.

06Summary

Haley Joel Osment never staged a dramatic comeback because he never really went away — he just traded the spotlight of child stardom for the steadier life of a character actor, and he’s spent the years since quietly stacking up credits across film, television, and video games.

The boy who saw dead people grew into a thoughtful, hardworking, occasionally troubled adult who keeps choosing the interesting role over the obvious one. Haley Joel Osment’s story isn’t a cautionary tale or a triumphant comeback — it’s just the long, real career of an actor who started at the very top and decided to keep going on his own terms.