Haley Joel Osment has spent the better part of his life as Sora, the spiky-haired keyblade wielding face of Final Fantasy and Disney crossover bliss. Osment's improbable, almost-lifelong journey as the star of Disney and Square Enix's ambitious RPG series Kingdom Hearts mirrors what we've come to expect with television shows with long lifespans. Like the Stark kids growing up on Game of Thrones, or Tony Soprano's kids on The Sopranos. In real-time what once were fresh-faced kids grow into young adults. Like all those kids, Osment's grown up too—heck, he's 30 now. And the leap from Kingdom Hearts to its deeper-voiced Sora sequel no longer seems so shocking.
"It is unique in that way," Osment tells me over the phone just weeks out from the release of the long-anticipated Kingdom Hearts 3. "I get that sometimes in live-action projects people get to play a character over a large number of years, but with this, you know, the fact that it's animated. I mean, first off there's technical considerations because for particularly early on Sora didn't age very much. I think he's a little bit older now [in Kingdom Hearts 3] than he was in Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2. But early on, you know, I started this when I was 12, and my voice had started to change and everything. So learning how to manipulate that and keep the voice sounding young while still preserving the range of emotions that Sora had; that was a unique challenge."
