Osment's good work
pays him forward
By Claudia Puig, USA Today
 MONTROSE,
Calif. — With an Oscar nomination under his diminutive belt, Haley Joel Osment is one
of the most successful actors around. But he's also just a kid.
That's evident as he tells a childhood war story about falling and cutting his tongue
at age 4 with equal parts gross-out and wide-eyed wonder.
"There was no blood, no nothing, it just hurt a lot," he says. "The
whole day, I was looking in the mirror, and there were these two little flaps that would
lift up like those change purses where you squeeze it and it opens like a mouth. I was
trying to look inside my tongue, and it was black inside. It was like my tongue was empty.
It was weird."
This 12-year-old with an easy laugh digs into his breakfast with gusto ("Oooh, I
love French toast; breakfast is my favorite meal") and tells it like it is: "I'm
really small for my age, and everybody is always like, 'You eat so much. How come you're
so small?' I hope to have my growth spurt soon."
He hardly needs one from a career standpoint. He stands only 4-foot-6, but his stature
is much larger in Hollywood. Oscar-nominated for his scared, sensitive lad who saw dead
people in The Sixth Sense, Haley may get more of the same acclaim for Pay It
Forward, which opens Friday. He plays a troubled but idealistic seventh-grader
alongside two actors who already have statuettes: Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt.
Now he's filming the sci-fi epic A.I. with Steven Spielberg, a director on every
actor's would-die-to-work-with list. Like everyone associated with the movie, he has been
required to stay mum about the story but feels safe saying: "We have a lot of
different locations, and it's a lot of fun. It's sort of a futuristic movie, so it's got
some pretty cool sets."
He makes a point of warmly thanking the waitress, cheerfully signs an autograph and is
unfailingly polite during an interview and photo shoot, habits that often elude actors
twice his age.
Spacey sees him as a peer. "The fact that he's 12 is just how old he is,"
Spacey says. "But the age of his wisdom is a lot more advanced than that. He has
handled, and will continue to handle, all that's been happening to him better than most
adults have handled it. We've watched so many other kids screw it up, but Haley's got his
feet firmly planted on the ground."
Others who know him say the child star has a knack for balancing a very grown-up work
ethic with boyish mischief.
"He takes everything in and listens to every word and reacts," says Pay It
Forward director Mimi Leder. "He works very hard, but when you say, 'Cut!' he
goes back to being a kid."
Says producer Peter Abrahams: "He would have his bike on the set and ride around
and do wheelies and then go toe-to-toe with Kevin Spacey."
Spacey and others attribute the boy's grounded nature to his family. "It's a
pretty prime example of great parenting," Spacey says. "His relationship with
his father, mother and sister is just admirable."
His father, Eugene, put his own acting career on the back burner to coach his son and
is on the set with him every day. Mom Theresa, a sixth-grade teacher, encouraged his
creativity early on.
"My mom really helped me exercise my imagination when I was really little,"
Haley says. "We had a closet full of costumes, and I'd be superheroes every
day."
By all accounts, his parents are the opposite of the stereotypical pushy stage parents.
They let their son act because he loves it, getting hooked after landing a pizza
commercial at age 5.
"I loved being around the set," Haley says. "I liked all the auditions.
Dad and Mom brought me to the cattle calls where all the kids sit in the same room. And
some kids are miserable, and some kids love it. I just loved it." (Although, he still
laments, "they had no pizza on the set whatsoever" for that first ad.)
The commercial was pivotal: A casting agent saw it and cast him as Tom Hanks' son in Forrest
Gump.
Since then, the Osments haven't pushed their son or allowed him to become a Hollywood
boy-about-town. While others were being primped, massaged and combed into perfection on
Oscar day, Haley remembers that he was taking out the family's trash.
When he's not shooting a movie, he's doing "a ton of reading," playing video
games, football or basketball, or watching classic comedies on "movie night" at
home with his parents and 8-year-old sister, Emily (who recently embarked on an acting
career with a role in TV's Sarah, Plain and Tall: Winter's End).
"I'm just a normal kid, that's what I like to be," Haley says. "I go to
school. I find time to have fun. I was up this morning watching cartoons"
(specifically, WB's Men in Black and Batman).
Like most kids his age, he's a fan of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Though
it was widely rumored that Haley was a top contender for the title role in the film
version, he matter-of-factly says that wasn't the case, then makes it clear that at least
a part of him is glad not to be playing the English wizard.
"I don't think it's right to make a movie out of such a great book," he says.
"It's sort of sad. With the book, everybody can interpret it their own way. Even if
I'd been offered it, I'm not sure I would have taken it. There are just things that should
stay as they are. "
That's obviously not how he feels about Pay It Forward, which got its start as a
book by Catherine Ryan Hyde. Haley plays Trevor, the son of an alcoholic single mother
(Hunt). He receives an assignment from a teacher (Spacey) to try to change the world.
Trevor decides to do good deeds for three randomly selected people, who then are asked to
do three good deeds for three other people, and so on, paying the good deeds forward.
While making the movie, Haley became friends with Spacey and Hunt. They have kept in
touch by e-mail, and Spacey and Hunt took Haley, Emily and their parents to Disneyland for
Haley's birthday in April.
But he also has friends with less star power.
He recently made a low-budget World War II drama called Edges of the Lord, shot
in Poland. Haley delights in describing a short movie he and some of his co-stars shot
during their off-hours.
"There were a ton of kids from all over the world, and they were all pretty much
my age," he says. "One of the kids' fathers had a video camera, and we shot this
little horror film in a hotel that was really old and scary. It was like a mockery of The
Shining. Basically, a kid runs around with a knife, kills everybody."
It wasn't acting or directing that was challenging. It was the props.
"We were in this small town," Haley says. "They had weird-tasting
ketchup, and when you went to ask for the ketchup at a restaurant, you would get two
(packets), and then you couldn't have any more. So we had to keep sneaking down to the
restaurant, sending different people down each time so they could collect enough ketchup
to use for fake blood."
Did that experience give him a taste for directing? "Yeah," he says.
"I'd like to direct. Maybe not horror films, though."
Others see an even brighter future. "I think he could be like Jimmy Stewart,"
Leder says. "He's a really nice and smart young man. And there's something about him
that you can see when he becomes a man: such great honesty and strength of
character."
When told about Leder's prediction, Haley beams a big, boyish grin. "I love Jimmy
Stewart! Mr. Smith Goes to Washington!" he exclaims, then adds: "But it's
hard to accurately predict what you're going to do. It's sort of hard to think that far
ahead."
Spoken like a boy wiser than his years. |
