By now I'm sure you've seen or heard that Haley Joel Osment has resurfaced in a rather spectacular fashion, playing a gay man in indie dramedy Sassy Pants. If you haven't (or even if you have and you just want to enjoy it again), witness the trailer:



What's striking about the response to the trailer, however, is how rabidly the internet has reacted, as though this particular role is somehow indicative of how far the mighty have fallen. (Don't think too deeply about how playing a gay man apparently equals utter actorly debasement.)

I'm sure Sassy Pants will sell plenty of tickets to people who think they're signing up for a car crash ride, getting to watch live as the cute little dude who saw dead people gets about in cut-off shorts. What's sad about that situation, however, is that - based on what little we get to see in the trailer - I'm sure Osment's performance is nuanced and sensitive.

After all, he was a good actor then, there's no reason why he isn't still.

He's not alone: everyone lost their minds when Jonathan Lipnicky was revealed to have turned from this:



into this:



And he was one of the "lucky" ones.

There's something particularly unkind about the way in which male child stars are allowed (or rather, not allowed) to age. While the "former child star" tag has haunted many actresses' downfalls, there are plenty of theses to be written about adorable little boys who suddenly turn into adults to the horror of the viewing public.

This whole thing makes me think of Jackie Earle Haley, who was never "cute" per se, but cut himself a niche playing sparky outcasts in films like The Bad News Bears. Of course now we know him for his Oscar-nominated turn in Little Children and his definitive work as Rorschach in Zack Snyder's Watchmen, but it was a very different story in between puberty and adulthood.

In William Booth's wonderful Washington Post interview with Haley back in 2007, the actor described what it was to attempt to make the jump from appealing little guy to adult: nearly impossible.

As a child actor, Haley says, "I was so programmed to expect that opportunity would seek me." It did not. After his body and his voice changed, after he stopped growing and began to look no longer cute and scrappy but ferrety and scary, what he calls "a character-actor-looking guy," he waited for the phone to ring. "I waited for 10 years." The roles became fewer, badder. "All of a sudden, they ask if you want to play this B role in this B movie and suddenly the quality of the role wasn't as important as paying my bills. And then a B movie leads to a C movie to D to F to theatrical oblivion."

Gutting, right?

For that reason, I'm always thrilled when former (male) child stars surface again, or keep working. The odds are stacked against them, in a way that - surprisingly - I don't think they are for their female equivalents (which seems wildly paradoxical given Hollywood's treatment of women in general). In some ways I think people relish the threat of adulthood in female child stars (witness the old trend for "countdown" tickers awaiting the day the Olsen twins became "legal"), whereas the boys are like a ticking time-bomb.

There's something deeper I'm trying to tease out here, and I can't quite get to the bottom of it. But I don't care if Haley Joel plays a gay man or an alien or the President of the United States: at least he made it out the other side.