Bruce Willis’ touching gesture to young former co-star revealed amid health battle and retirement

The star of The Sixth Sense announced his retirement from acting after being diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.

1999’s The Sixth Sense introduced Bruce Willis to a whole new audience as a capable and critically acclaimed dramatic actor, and made a bonafide star of the young Haley Joel Osment.

Haley was just 10 years old when he made the psychological thriller, and found a father figure in Bruce, now 69 and retired due to his ongoing battle with frontotemporal dementia.

In honor of the movie’s 25th anniversary, Haley, now 36, sat down with Entertainment Weekly to reflect on the iconic M. Night Shyamalan production, and his relationship with Bruce now.

He also revealed that for years after making the film, the Die Hard star made concerted efforts to keep in touch with him and act as a mentor of sorts. “I heard from him a lot after it came out in those subsequent years,” he shared.

“He’d leave voicemails at the house from time to time, just checking in. He would just call out of the blue, so sometimes it was in the lead up before travel,” he continued. “We went to Japan together twice, if I remember correctly, to open Sixth Sense in different cities.”

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“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.”

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Haley added, though, that he hadn’t been able to keep in contact with the actor amid his recent health struggles, although was friends with his daughters. “I know his daughters a little bit, but I have not spoken to him since the news of his health in recent years.”

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The Forrest Gump actor fondly recalled some of his favorite things about working with the veteran actor, who’d already become a household name at the time thanks to his work in thrillers and mysteries.

“It was fantastic,” he said of working with Bruce. “I had worked with Tom Hanks before on Forrest Gump and other big name actors, but at that point I was old enough to have seen a lot of Bruce’s movies, which added a lot of excitement to it.”

“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.”

He added: “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.”

“It was a script that we all cared about so much and put so much effort into, and Bruce led the way on that.”