“The comeback starts now,” said Haley Joel Osment, as he leaned across the pool table and lined up his shot for a middle pocket. He missed. Wildly. “It’s a subtle comeback.”
On a recent Monday, Mr. Osment was in New York to promote the new season of “Future Man,” a science fiction comedy on Hulu, and to audition for some new roles. He had met up with his college friend Nicole Pursell, an actress, at one of their undergrad haunts: Fat Cat, a scruffy, subterranean jazz bar and billiards hall in Greenwich Village that smells like spilled beer.
Mr. Osment’s freshman year dorm at New York University was around the corner, and he used to come here weekly, playing pool if a table was open and Ping-Pong if it wasn’t. Shuffleboard, too. He liked to come really late at night. “You could see people sleeping against the walls,” he said nostalgically.
Mr. Osment, 30, was a go-to child actor of the late 1990s and early ’00s, four-feet-plus of wounded innocence topped with meltwater blue eyes. See: M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” and Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.”
But when he turned 18, he traded Hollywood for college, enrolling at the Tisch School of the Arts at N.Y.U., where he studied at the Experimental Theater Wing. He learned capoeira and modern dance, and had a teacher tell him he was pretending to walk through blood all wrong. People thought he had disappeared.
“The irony is, all I was doing was acting — all day, every day,” Mr. Osment said. “Just nobody could see it.”
He and Ms. Pursell were scene partners in the first year, working through “Death and the Maiden,” a play by Ariel Dorfman that involves a hostage situation. Their teacher provided a very realistic prop gun.
“It was a good start, you holding that gun to my head,” Mr. Osment said.
“It was like the perfect way in,” Ms. Pursell said. “Then we were friends.”
Mr. Osment graduated in 2011 and has been working steadily since, with an arc on the Amazon comedy “Alpha House” and a three-episode run as a flip-flops-wearing angel investor on “Silicon Valley.”
“The irony is, all I was doing was acting — all day, every day,” Mr. Osment said, about his days after being a child star. “Just nobody could see it.” CreditAmy Lombard for The New York Times
He now has a recurring role on “Future Man,” as Stu Camillo, a post-apocalypse “toxic nice guy,” as Mr. Osment describes him, who just might destroy all of humanity. He has also filmed roles in Edward James Olmos’s pollution thriller, “The Devil Has a Name,” and the Ted Bundy biopic “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile.”
So Mr. Osment doesn’t really need a comeback, except when it comes to pool.
He and his college friends are big into games: bar games, board games, trivia. He and Ms. Pursell are in two fantasy football leagues together. (They would not divulge their team names; according to Ms. Pursell, they may be “unpublishable.”)
In the years since college, Ms. Pursell joined a billiards league and Mr. Osment did not. She even arrived with her own pool cue and her own baby powder. “Otherwise my hands get too sticky,” she said.
“I just hope this is educational,” said Mr. Osment, who wore a blazer and a tidy beard.
After a quick catch-up, Mr. Osment racked the balls and broke with something less than perfect confidence. Ms. Pursell chose solids and started clearing the table efficiently, while Mr. Osment struggled to sink a single ball. “Oh my goodness, who could have seen that coming?” Mr. Osment said with a deadpan.
She sent her 8 ball into the wrong pocket, though, so Mr. Osment ended up winning the first game.
In the second game, his break did not improve (“so weak,” he muttered), but Ms. Pursell explained that as long as four balls touched the sides, the break was in play. He seemed pleasantly surprised when a striped ball went in. Ms. Pursell applauded. “Thank you,” he said. “I need all the encouragement I can get.”
It wasn’t enough. Mr. Osment missed his next shot and Ms. Pursell methodically picked off the solids, though she soon ran into a snag. So many of his stripes were crowded around a corner pocket that she couldn’t sink her last ball. “Ah, the strategy of losing by so much, you can’t get to your balls,” he told Ms. Pursell.
It took a little while longer, but she eventually made her shot before focusing on the 8 ball. This time, she won.
A tiebreaker was in order. “Let me rack,” Ms. Pursell said, before offering Mr. Osment some tips. She showed him how to pull the cue back, using the elbow as a fulcrum. “Do the robot.”
It worked. Mr. Osment did the robot and he sank one ball. Then another and another and another. The comeback was here! One more ball and the game could have been his.
Alas, he missed and Ms. Pursell wasted no time in sinking her last two balls and then the 8 ball.
To celebrate her victory, Mr. Osment bought a round of drinks (a Sixpoint for him, a Narragansett for her) and found a quiet table back behind the bar, where they could sit and reminisce about college.
“It really was like the best time of my life,” Mr. Osment said. “I had very rarely worked with people my own age, if at all, so to be only around people who were exactly my age was fantastic.”
