Haley Joel Osment's extended break from Los Angeles kept him away from the "predatory" and "aggressive" tabloid culture.
Osment, now 36, gained fame at the age of 5 after starring as Forrest Junior in the Oscar-winning film "Forrest Gump."
"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."
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Osment chose to take a break from Hollywood in 2006 when he moved to New York City to attend NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.
"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."
"I remember being very happy to not be making my home in Los Angeles at that time."
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Osment took a yearslong break after starring in "Home of the Giants," which filmed in 2005 but aired in 2007. He returned to the big screen with a role in the 2012 film, "The Misadventures of the Dunderheads."
In the years since, he has steadily worked on various movies, TV shows and video games.
The actor lived in New York City for 15 years before making his way back to Los Angeles, where the paparazzi culture has "mellowed out a bit."
"We're in a different era than we were."
Social media has seemingly changed the paparazzi culture. Osment explained photos and videos "willingly posted online" to his Instagram keeps fans' curiosity satiated.
"It's an interesting shift in dynamics," he noted. "At this point I'm comfortable with it."
"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.'"
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Osment gained fame after starring in "Forrest Gump." He continued his career into adulthood and is most known for "The Sixth Sense," "Pay it Forward," "Secondhand Lions" and "A.I. Artificial Intelligence."
"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."
