Haley Joel Osment: aspiring acrobat of the heart
At 18 The Sixth Sense star went to study experimental theatre. Here's what he learned
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I initially imagined this newsletter as a place for “not-news”: a prompt to write in a less mercenary way, and a means of connecting directly with people who might be open to reading it. As a freelance journalist with no particular beat, I’m always trying to figure out the through line in my work, and what connects my disparate interests (sharks! Pop music! Dermot Mulroney!).
There is also little sense of community to being a generalist, the way there might be in specialising. This newsletter is a very small attempt to start one – by bringing together work that I have recently published, other people’s writing I have enjoyed, and silly tweets that made me laugh.
I have zero intention of trying to monetise it – just your time is enough. But if you do have any suggestions, feedback or thoughts on what you’d like to hear from me in future, please get in touch. That’s Not News is a work in progress and, I hope, a collaboration.
For now, here’s The Sixth Sense star Haley Joel Osment – on what experimental theatre taught him about being open to the world.
‘It seems so attractive to be able to disappear into a crowd’
At 18, Haley Joel Osment – with an Oscar nomination, a multi-million-dollar trust and credits with Bruce Willis, Tom Hanks, M. Night Shyamalan and Steven Spielberg already to his name – decided to move from Los Angeles to New York to study experimental theatre.
There he learned how to break down his theatrical performance by the “six viewpoints” – space, shape, time, emotion, movement and story – and to develop an idea “from the centre outwards, instead of working from beginning to the end”. “Extremely abstract stuff,” said Osment enthusiastically, during our recent interview for the Guardian.
Part of what he was taught to reach for was the vulnerability and lack of self-consciousness he had shown, instinctively, in his performances a child. Osment remembers a professor telling the class: “All of these things I try out on you guys, I try out on my five-year-old daughter first’.”
“Kids haven’t developed that concern that you have to have about how you appear to other people,” Osment explained. “You need that to be able to survive in daily life – but as an actor, you have to try and strip that away.”
In fact Osment’s early success as an actor – in Forrest Gump, The Sixth Sense, Pay It Forward, Artificial Intelligence – had caused him to grow up “a little bit on guard”. As a young man he grew a beard in the hopes it would allow him to be anonymous in public, in part of the sake of his craft.
“There’s a big part of passive absorbing of things that is helpful as an actor, when you want to observe people, or you are having anonymous interactions. … It seems so attractive to be able to disappear into the crowd.”
Now 32, Osment said he strives to strike a balance between that openness to experience and the self-preservation necessary for survival – so as to be a better actor, and a better person.
A talk by Stephen Wangh – author of An Acrobat of the Heart, a “physical approach” to acting, based on the method of the Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski – made a particular impression on him as a student. According to Wangh, an actor does their best work when they are “completely open to all the emotional input” of a scene – but day to day, that isn’t feasible.
“Can you imagine walking down the street in New York City, being truly open? It would be impossible to survive!” Osment said animatedly. “Every day you see something amazing, or something horrifying – plenty of times you see people walking down the street just openly crying.”
“There’s a lot of emotion, and wonderful things, and threats, so you have to develop some kind of filter so that you’re not being bombarded by that stuff all the time – but in finding openings for it, particularly on stage or in front of the camera, that’s definitely a sure way to do some good work.”
What I’ve been working on
‘This virus is a long way from gone’: For my friends at The Spinoff in New Zealand, able to enjoy gatherings of more than 100 people, I wrote about the unsettling experience of lockdown easing in London – against all scientific advice. The self-conscious references to Covid-19 on billboards and shop signs (“Lights, cameras, hand gel!”, “Be social… but remember your distancing”) reminded me of the unseen forces pushing us towards resuming business as usual. We expect corporations to show some social responsibility – what if, instead of seeking to reassure us about the global pandemic, the aim of Covid-referencing messaging was to get us to take it seriously? Instead, in England, even the government is haranguing us to return to the high street, to revive the economy and restore “normality” by Christmas. Of course the only take you need read on that is Marina Hyde’s – though I also appreciated this tweet:
…and this tweet:
‘Tying the right to vote to a regular visit assumes privilege, and global mobility’: I was dismayed to discover that I can’t vote in New Zealand’s upcoming general election because I have not been back to visit in three years. Who made this rule, my mum? New Zealanders, I’m counting on you to vote yes on euthanasia and cannabis.
‘Think twice, if you want to be a movie star’: I interviewed My Best Friend’s Wedding star Dermot Mulroney about 35-odd years in show business, the perils of seeking fame for young people, and his enduring friendship with Julia Roberts. (She is a formidable homemaker, apparently.)
‘Remember when there used to be clever people?’: David Tennant talked to me from his garden about his BBC comedy There She Goes, the “very sad state of affairs” that is UK politics, and the decimation of the cultural sector by Covid-19. He has said he is an optimist – but “it gets harder, doesn’t it?”
‘If they bumped us, we would bump them back’: The Guardian held its own ‘Shark Week’, for which I wrote about the history of filming sharks. Turns out that, should you be bitten, the thing to do is “make him let go”. No further questions! (If you are looking for an easy, escapist read that will also quicken the pulse – Valerie Taylor’s memoir, An Adventurous Life, is full of great advice like this. Her 1971 documentary, Blue Water, White Death, is mostly very stressful.)
‘Everybody wanted to do the Indianapolis speech’: I spoke to the founders of “the news centre for Jaws” about their very funny, fan-made, nearly full-length recreation of the classic film. This may be the King Lear to emerge from Covid-19 quarantine.
‘It doesn’t feel like summer’: 2017 was Despacito, 2018 was In My Feelings (= Nice For What), 2019 was Old Town Road – but what will be the song of summer 2020? Will we even know, without field data from parties, bars, weddings and festivals? I put the question to artists, critics and industry players for G2’s Film and Music, in a feature that Guardian commenters warn will make you feel old. I also banged together the songs that cropped up as contenders in a Spotify playlist (though inclusion, specifically of Death Bed and Savage Love, is not an endorsement).
Further reading
‘I am a sister from London. I am a Bethnal Green girl’ (GQ): The ruling last week over Shamima Begum – who moved to Syria to join Islamic State as a teenager in 2015 – recirculated this remarkable story by the Times’ war reporter Anthony Lloyd, who found Begum in a refugee camp early last year. I was struck not only by the odds against Lloyd – “little better than 40,000 to one”, he writes – but his ambivalence about the vitriolic national debate that ensued: “The woman … came to me for help, and left with less than she began.”
‘We were used and abused by everybody who wanted to make money off us’ (The Guardian): Too many words have been spent on our so-called “cancel culture” (in a crowded field, these may be the worst). I do not intend to contribute more other than to say, I have seen no case studies that can’t be summarised as “actions have consequences”; and few criticisms that don’t function as attempts to protect those who already have platforms and power. An exception is The (Dixie) Chicks, who were quite clearly, meaningfully “cancelled” for their views about George W Bush back in 2003. But, as my pal Shaad D’Souza points out in The Saturday Paper, the band saw the potential for freedom at the time; and now they are back with a new album, in a climate more receptive to speaking truth to power (much to the displeasure of the Harper’s letter gang). I plan to get to know the Chicks better, and this interview, by (also pal) Laura Snapes, was a great place to start.
On ‘feeling always like a shambling, pale parody of a man’ (The Hedgehog Review): I found this a funny and thought-provoking essay about masculinity, and how one man found his lived experience to be at odds with representations by feminists and Jordan Peterson, on YouTube and HBO. I also appreciated the cautionary note against looking to evolutionary psychology (not to mention, biological sex) for proof of some essential way of being. Writing about sex, relationships and social trends in the past, I have leaned on quasi-scientific theories of “human nature” out of convenience – but it pays to remember, as sex educator Emily Nagoski wrote on the differences between men and women: “Variety may be the only truly universal characteristic … There is at least as much variability within those groups as there is between those groups.”
Spending more (exclusively) time online since lockdown I have come to anticipate the arrival of three email newsletters in particular. Rest of World is an excellent new journalism nonprofit that focuses on the human experience of tech in the non-Western world, like the drive in Turkey to create “Uber for fortune-telling” and Bangladesh’s finch trade over Facebook. Vast and unknowable, The Imperica’s weekly digest is a treasure trove I look forward to landing in my inbox every Friday. And I appreciate Nicole Cardoza’s Anti-Racism Daily as a necessary, daily prompt to focus the mind on addressing racial injustice – especially now that social media maybe more preoccupied with cakes that don’t look like cakes.
Speaking of which, I found the most treacherous one:
