Haley Joel Osment

Haley Joel Osment was born in Los Angeles in 1988 and was on screen at six, playing Forrest Gump's son, a part that won him a Young Artist Award. Five years later The Sixth Sense made him the most sought-after child actor alive: a Saturn Award, plus nominations for the Academy Award, the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild.

What made that performance work is that he refused to play fear as screaming. Cole Sear is a boy who is tired, who has been carrying something for years, and Osment gives him the flat, careful voice of a child managing an adult problem. It is a deeply unshowy piece of work from an eleven-year-old, and it is why the film survives its own reputation. He kept the standard up for a while, too. Pay It Forward, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which brought a second Saturn Award, Secondhand Lions, which brought a Critics Choice Award, and Mowgli in The Jungle Book 2.

Then he stopped, grew up, and came back as something else entirely. The modern Osment is a character comedian with a specialism in smug, ridiculous, faintly unpleasant men: an over-invested podcaster in Tusk, a preening scientist in Future Man, a corporate villain in Camp Cretaceous, small unpleasant parts in Poker Face and Blink Twice. The child star known for vulnerability now makes his living being punchable, and he is very funny at it.