Haley Joel Osment

Haley Joel Osment was born on April 10, 1988, in Los Angeles, California, to Theresa Osment, a teacher, and Michael Eugene Osment, a theater and film actor. Both of his parents are originally from Birmingham, Alabama, and Osment was raised Roman Catholic. His younger sister, Emily, is also an actress. Osment attended Flintridge Preparatory School in La Cañada Flintridge, California, and later earned a degree from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2011.

Osment's path into acting began at age four, when a visit to a store led to a meeting with a talent scout. An audition followed, during which his description of an IMAX theater screen secured him a role in a Pizza Hut television commercial. That commercial launched his professional career, and he soon appeared in the ABC sitcom Thunder Alley. His first feature film credit came in 1994, when he played Forrest Gump's son in the Robert Zemeckis film Forrest Gump, a role that earned him a Young Artist Award. Throughout the remainder of the 1990s, Osment appeared in recurring television roles on series including The Jeff Foxworthy Show and Murphy Brown, as well as guest appearances on Walker, Texas Ranger, Touched by an Angel, Chicago Hope, The Pretender, and Ally McBeal. He also appeared in the 1996 film Bogus alongside Whoopi Goldberg and Gérard Depardieu.

Osment's breakthrough arrived in 1999 with the psychological thriller The Sixth Sense, in which he co-starred with Bruce Willis as Cole Sear, a child who perceives the dead. The performance earned him a Saturn Award for Best Performance by a Younger Actor, and he received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, a Golden Globe Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Cole Sear's line "I see dead people" became a widely recognized cultural reference, ranked forty-fourth on the American Film Institute's list of 100 Movie Quotes. The following year, Osment took a leading role in Pay It Forward, and in 2001 he appeared in Steven Spielberg's science fiction film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, earning a second Saturn Award for Best Younger Actor. In 2003, he starred in Secondhand Lions, which brought him a Critics Choice Award, and provided a voice role in the animated film The Jungle Book 2.

Beginning in 2002, Osment became the voice of protagonist Sora, and later Vanitas, in the Kingdom Hearts video game series, a role with which he remains associated. Additional voice work during the early 2000s included the Walt Disney Pictures productions The Country Bears and The Hunchback of Notre Dame II, as well as the English-language version of the Immortal Grand Prix anime series.

Osment made his Broadway debut in 2008 at the Belasco Theatre, playing Bobby in a revival of David Mamet's American Buffalo. He co-starred in the production alongside John Leguizamo and Cedric the Entertainer. The show opened to mixed reviews, and a provisional announcement on November 20, 2008, indicated it would close after its first week of performances.

Following his Broadway appearance, Osment expanded his work behind the camera by serving as executive producer on the independent film Montana Amazon, in which he also acted alongside Olympia Dukakis. The film debuted at the Orlando and Big Apple Film Festivals in November 2010, winning Best Feature Film at the latter. His subsequent screen credits include the body horror film Tusk (2014), the comedy Sex Ed (2014), the Entourage film adaptation (2015), the drama Almost Friends (2016), and Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town (2017) and Clara's Ghost (2018). In 2017, he held a recurring role as VR expert Keenan Feldspar in season four of HBO's Silicon Valley. Osment appeared in the 2019 Netflix film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, and in the 2023 Amazon Prime film Somebody I Used to Know. He also plays Mesmer in the Amazon series The Boys and Dr. Stu Camillo in the Hulu series Future Man.

In animation, Osment has voiced Kash D. Langford on the Netflix series Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous beginning in 2021, Leonard "Buzzsaw" Burne on DreamWorks Dragons: The Nine Realms from 2021 to 2023, Casey Jones in Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie (2022), and Collector in LEGO Marvel Avengers: Code Red (2023).