After high school, Haley Joel Osment had to stop seeing movie people for awhile.

"My parents used to say when I first started out in this industry, 'If it's ever not fun, you can quit tomorrow,'" the now 36-year-old actor told E! News in an exclusive interview. "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 verdict, 25 years after The Sixth Sense made him a household name and he scored an Oscar nomination at 11?

"The answer has always been yes at all these junctures," said Osment, whose latest film is Zoë Kravitz's directorial debut, Blink Twice, in theaters Aug. 23. "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."

But he also happened to pick exactly the right time to put some distance between himself and Hollywood.

When he was busy enrolling at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in 2006, "those were pretty tense years in terms of how celebrity was in Los Angeles," Osment recalled. There was "this very predatory, aggressive kind of tabloid engagement with certain celebrities."

Suffice it to say, he added, "I remember being very happy to not be making my home in Los Angeles at that time." 

The L.A. native ended up living in New York for about 15 years before moving back to the figurative center of the industry, where last fall he was seen hitting the picket line outside Walt Disney Studios in Burbank with his fellow striking Screen Actors Guild members.

His hometown has since "mellowed out a bit," Osment noted, at least as far as the toxic paparazzi culture he witnessed as a teen is concerned. "We're in a different era than we were."

And while it admittedly took him "a long time to figure out how to navigate social media" as a public figure who also cared about his privacy, Osment credits content that's "willingly posted online" for helping to turn the temperature down.

"It's an interesting shift in dynamics," he noted, having eventually taken the plunge with Instagram to counter the myriad fake accounts claiming to be him that had already sprung up over the years.

"At this point I'm comfortable with it," Osment said. And "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. I resisted it for so long and now it's like, 'Hey, it's fun to do some posts.'"

But like Hollywood in the late '00s, Osment isn't sorry to have missed out on this online scene when he was a kid, either.

"When I came up in this industry, the Internet was around but it wasn't so omnipresent that it is today," said Osment, who was 5 when he made his big-screen debut in 1994's Forrest Gump. "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."

In Blink Twice, Osment plays Tom, a morally pliable struggling actor who—in the middle of a hedonistic getaway on an island belonging to a billionaire played by Channing Tatum—eats nothing but hard-boiled eggs to slim down for a part. ("There might be a spit bucket under the table," Osment cracked.)

But though he's got three decades in show business under his belt, Osment says he hasn't had "too many interactions" with Tom-like characters, a guy who's "sort of pathetic" but trying to "be a better man and optimize his life."

Incidentally, Tom also feels as much a departure from Osment's sunny nature as the role of dead people-seeing Cole Sear in The Sixth Sense did in 1999.

"My voice sounds a lot higher than I remember it when it was coming out of my mouth at the time," Osment said of going back as an adult to watch the film that changed his life. "But it's strange, because I remember being inside of those scenes very well. And it's weird to be looking at them 25 years later and how young that person seems."

To director M. Night Shyamalan's credit, "and to all the directors and producers and fellow actors that I've worked with," he continued, "I always felt very comfortable on set. There's a lot of adrenaline that's involved when you want to get a scene right, but everyone that I worked with made sure that there was never any kind of weird, undue pressure to do the job right."

And coming home from school to "great messages" on the answering machine from Bruce Willis also remains a cherished memory from that time.

"He is just such a legend," Osment said of his Sixth Sense costar, who officially retired from acting in 2022 after being diagnosed with aphasia. "It's been hard to see what he and his family have had to go through."

But having met Willis' daughters, he added, "it gives you some comfort that he does have such a wonderful family. They're all so close and have been handling a really difficult situation in a really courageous way, so I admire them a lot."

Meanwhile, Osment continues to credit his own "really great parents"—theater actor dad Michael Eugene Osment and teacher mom Theresa Osment—and their "healthy suspicion of the industry" for helping him stay grounded through the years. Going to "regular school" and having friends outside the industry helped anchor him as well.

But it has also helped to have little sister Emily Osment with him in the business—she also started acting when she was 5—and they remain a tight sibling unit.

"We definitely have tried to help each other as much as we can," Osment said, though "she didn't need too much advice from me. She forged her own path, and her comedy career has been pretty incredible."

The whole family also has the 32-year-old's big day to look forward to, the Young Sheldon alum having confirmed her engagement to Jack Anthony in June 2023.

"That's coming up," Osment shared. "We were just all getting our groomsmen suits tailored a couple weeks ago, so it's going to be a great wedding."

Reflecting on his sister's success alongside his own, he added, "I'm really happy for her and proud of her. It's fun that we both get to still be doing this after starting as children."

And 30 years in, it hasn't gotten old.

For instance, Osment said it was "such a dream" getting to work recently with Tim Burton on the upcoming second season of Netflix's Wednesday, which stars Jenna Ortega as the Addams family standout.

"I've admired him forever, I love his movies," Osment said of the show's creator. "That's one of those days where you show up on set, you get to see somebody like that at work, and it's just like, 'Wow, this is why I love my job.'"