Haley Joel Osment was one of the biggest child stars of the 2000s with the film Sixth Sense catapulting him to stardom. However, that came with a price.
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"My parents used to say when I first started out in this industry, 'If it's ever not fun, you can quit tomorrow,'" Osment told E! News. "And when I got to be college age, I got to go off and study theater and really think hard about whether I wanted to do this as my career in life.
"The answer has always been yes at all these junctures," he explained. "It's still a job that I really enjoy, despite all the uncertainty and the difficulty of being able to plan your life three to six months out."
Ultimately, he decided to leave Hollywood in 2006. The child star wanted to go to New York City to attend NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. He also wanted to escape the tabloids and the limelight for a while.
"Those were pretty tense years in terms of how celebrity was in Los Angeles," Osment recalled. At the time, there was "this very predatory, aggressive kind of tabloid engagement with certain celebrities."
Haley Joel Osment Talks Fame
Osment said he was very happy to leave. He said, "I remember being very happy to not be making my home in Los Angeles at that time." Ultimately, Osment chose to take a break after starring in Home of the Giants. He wouldn't return to films until he starred in the 2012 film The Misadventures of the Dunderheads.
He found that the industry appeared to change since he left.
"We're in a different era than we were," he said. "It's an interesting shift in dynamics. At this point I'm comfortable with it."
Osment also weighed on social media and privacy as a star.
"In this very large media environment, it's the way to promote your projects and help people keep up to date on what you're doing within the balance of reasonable privacy," Osment added. "I resisted it for so long, and now it's like, 'Hey, it's fun to do some posts.'"
"When I came up in this industry, the Internet was around, but it wasn't so omnipresent that it is today," Osment explained. "So for younger actors today, I'm always really impressed with them being able to manage the TikTok-Instagram-social media landscape, because that's not something I ever really had to deal with at that age."
