Haley Joel Osment Talks Break From Acting & Leaving Los Angeles For 15 Years

Haley Joel Osment is opening up about leaving Hollywood behind for several years.

The 36-year-old actor, who can next be seen in Blink Twice, has been acting nearly his whole life, but there was a time where he took a break from the limelight and enrolled in collage at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2006.

During a new interview, he dished on taking a break and moving to New York, where he resided for nearly 15 years.

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“My parents used to say when I first started out in this industry, ‘If it’s ever not fun, you can quit tomorrow,’” he 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,” Haley added. “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.”

The Sixth Sense actor also recalled how the time he was enrolling in school, “those were pretty tense years in terms of how celebrity was in Los Angeles,” noting 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,” he added.

The same time Haley was leaving Hollywood to go to school, his younger sister Emily Osment was landing a big role on Hannah Montana!

If you missed it, check out Haley Joel Osment in the Blink Twice trailer, and you can catch him and more in the movie, which is out in theaters THIS Friday (August 23).