Bruce Willis’ Costar Recalls Actor’s Kindness: ‘Heard From Him A Lot’
By Movieguide® Contributor
Bruce Willis’ THE SIXTH SENSE costar Haley Joel Osment is reflecting on his friendship with the iconic movie star.
When asked what it was like to work with Willis, Osment immediately said, “It was fantastic!”
“At that point I was old enough to have seen a lot of Bruce’s movies, which added a lot of excitement to it,” he continued. “And that’s something that lasts your entire career, where you get to work with people who you’ve enjoyed watching in other things. And 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,” Osment added. “It was a script that we all cared about so much and put so much effort into, and Bruce led the way on that.”
As if we couldn’t love Willis anymore, Osment shared that Willis stayed in touch with the young actor following the film’s release.
“I heard from him a lot after it came out in those subsequent years. He’d leave voicemails at the house from time to time, just checking in,” Osment revealed. “He would just call out of the blue, so sometimes it was in the lead up before travel. We went to Japan together twice, if I remember correctly, to open SIXTH SENSE in different cities. So he 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.’ I need to find those old answering tapes. I know we preserved those.”
He did share that he hasn’t spoken to Willis since his dementia diagnosis.
Movieguide® previously reported on Willis’ health:
Bruce Willis is now largely “incommunicative” as his frontotemporal dementia progresses, according to a friend.
“My sense is the first one to three minutes he knows who I am,” MOONLIGHTING creator Glenn Gordon Caron said of the actor. “He’s not totally verbal; he used to be a voracious reader—he didn’t want anyone to know that—and he’s not reading now. All those language skills are no longer available to him, and yet he’s still Bruce.”
Caron shared that he has “tried very hard to stay in [Willis’] life” and visits the actor on a monthly basis.
“He’s an extraordinary person,” he continued. “The thing that makes [his disease] so mind-blowing is [that] if you’ve ever spent time with Bruce Willis, there is no one who had any more joie de vivre than he. He loved life and…just adored waking up every morning and trying to live life to its fullest. So the idea that he now sees life through a screen door, if you will, makes very little sense. He’s really an amazing guy.”
Willis’ ex-wife, Demi Moore, said of his health last month, “Given the givens, he’s in a stable place.”
“What I say to my kids is you meet them where they’re at. You don’t hold on to who they were or what you want them to be, but who they are in this moment,” she said. “And from that, there is such beauty and joy and loving and sweetness.”
His and Moore’s daughter Tallulah recently shared some photos with Willis.
“Hey I love this guy so much and feeling feelings is tough stuff, but I’m so grateful to let them flow through me now instead of disconnecting from it! From the forever archives,” she wrote in the caption.
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