Haley Joel Osment is sharing his reaction to being referenced by Kendrick Lamar.
The actor unwittingly joined Lamar’s charting rap beef against Drake when he dropped “Euphoria” in April, and although Lamar confusingly referred to him as megachurch pastor Joel Osteen in the song, Osment — like countless other fans — thinks the mix-up was deliberate.
“I was shooting in Ireland when all that happened, and I got like a hundred texts in the middle of the night,” the former child star told The Associated Press in a red carpet interview for his latest film, “Blink Twice,” on Sunday. “And I was like, ‘What is going on?’”
“I don’t know for sure, and I’m not going to assume that he knows my exact name,” he continued. “But the way I’ve heard people talk about that and certain analysis that I’ve read about it, I think that it’s an intentional scrambling of my name and that other guy’s name, because Kendrick’s too precise to just make a mistake like that, I think.”
Lamar and Drake had thrown subtle jabs at each other for years before finally squaring off when Drake dropped “Taylor Made Freestyle” on his Instagram account in April and used artificial intelligence to generate the voices of Snoop Dogg and the late Tupac Shakur to hurl insults at Lamar.
Lamar then responded with “Euphoria,” the first of four diss tracks against Drake, and rapped, “Am I battlin’ ghost or AI / Ni**a feelin’ like Joel Osteen / Funny, he was in a film called ‘A.I.’ / And my sixth sense tellin’ me to off him.”
Unlike Osteen, Osment actually starred in 2001′s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” by Steven Spielberg, as well as 1999′s “The Sixth Sense” by M. Night Shyamalan, which Lamar also referenced in his follow-up to “Euphoria,” “Not Like Us,” opening the song with Osment’s classic line: “I see dead people.”
While some considered the couplet a glaring misstep, others argued Lamar intentionally said Osteen to suggest that Drake has a similarly opportunistic disposition and that his fabricated image makes a mockery of the culture he profits from.
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Lamar has been crowned the winner in the feud since the release of “Not Like Us,” with the track reportedly becoming the most-streamed diss track on Spotify.