Twenty-five years ago, a little film by an unknown director by the name of M. Night Shyamalan rocked the summer blockbuster season. The film was “The Sixth Sense,” starring Bruce Willis as child psychologist Malcolm Crewe, who begins treating a young boy named Cole Sear, played by Haley Joel Osment. Crewe soon learns that Sear is going through something much more supernatural than he’s prepared for and Sear’s desperate confession, “I see dead people” has become a cultural tagline, along with the film’s shocking twist. It was a breakout film for Osment, who had first gained fame at 5-years-old playing Forrest Gump’s son, Forrest, Jr. in the Oscar-winning “Forrest Gump.” But in 2006, he left Los Angeles for New York to attend NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, taking a 15-year hiatus LA and the spotlight. Now, he’s opening up about why he made the decision to walk away for a decade and a half.

Now 36, Osment spoke to E! News, telling the outlet that he began considering what he really wanted to do. “My parents used to say when I first started out in this industry, ‘If it’s ever not fun, you can quit tomorrow. 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,” he said. Despite the break, his love for acting never truly diminished. “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 the break from LA and fame was much needed, with Osment noting that while in LA, there was a “very predatory, aggressive kind of tabloid engagement with certain celebrities.”

Now that he’s returned, he states the paparazzi culture has “mellowed out a bit,” crediting the rise of social media platforms like Instagram. “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,” he said. “When I came up in this industry, the Internet was around but it wasn’t so omnipresent as it is today. So, for younger actors today, I’m always really impressed with them being able to manage the social media landscape, because that’s not something I ever really had to deal with at that age,” he said.

The hiatus was not without its drama, with Osment being sentenced to probation in 2006 for drunk driving and possession of marijuana prior. At the time, it was portrayed as a major meltdown, typical of what many child actors experience in their time. But in a previous interview, Osment said the incident “could not have had less to do with Hollywood.” He stated that he believed child actors who enjoy the business and then may move on to have successful careers in other areas may be more the norm than the sensational stories of child actors gone wrong. Osment’s is now appearing in the thriller “Blink Twice,” out now which will be Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut.