If it hadn’t been for a trip to Ikea in the early ’90s, Haley Joel Osment may not have become one of the biggest child stars of the last 25 years.
“I was at the Burbank Ikea, and it’s so weird that they’d do this because I think if you saw this now, you’d be like, ‘What?’ But they had a casting table with two women taking Polaroids of all the kids who would come into the store,” the “Sixth Sense” star explained of his accidental introduction to the biz in a recent chat with Vulture.
Weird or not – “I guess our stranger-danger knowledge was poor in the early ’90s, as a society.” – whoever went through the pictures thought the now-29-year-old had that special something.
“They took a Polaroid and nobody thought anything of it until we got called to do a cattle call at one of those kids’ commercial things. We went, and from that audition, within a couple of weeks, I was doing a Pizza Hut commercial for Bigfoot pizzas, a promotional pizza they had. Just from that commercial, the casting director for ‘Forrest Gump’ got in contact with us and I was reading with [director Robert] Zemeckis and Tom Hanks pretty soon after that,” he said. “It all kind of snowballed from there.”
As much of a whirlwind as the period may have been, the actor, who most recently appeared on “Silicon Valley,” said he was actually able to enjoy himself. In fact, he claims acting didn’t even stop him from experiencing a relatively normal, everyday childhood.
“No, it’s always fun! Not terrifying or scary. It’s funny because — and it’s kind of true today in a lot of ways — the time you spend making these is relatively short. So I went to regular school throughout everything, all the way through high school, and ended up doing college and everything,” he said. “We couldn’t have been shooting ‘Gump’ for more than two weeks.”