Rob Reiner‘s complicated relationship with his famous father shaped a lifelong mission to save his own troubled son – a mission that may have ultimately cost the filmmaker his life.
The actor and director spoke candidly over the years about yearning for validation from Hollywood icon dad Carl Reiner, and his commitment to being a better parent to his own children, particularly younger son, Nick, 32, who has long struggled with addiction and instability.
But that private, painful struggle appeared to a devastating twist when Nick allegedly cut the throats of both his father Rob, 78, and his mother Michele, 70, at their Brentwood home on December 14.
Authorities say the couple died from ‘multiple sharp-force injuries.’
The killings have highlighted the unresolved father-son dynamic that shaped Rob Reiner’s life.
Speaking about his childhood in an interview with NPR’s Fresh Air, just three months ago, Reiner said: ‘I felt that my father didn’t, you know, love me or understand me.’
Host Terry Gross noted that those feelings seemed at odds with what Reiner had described as his affection and admiration for Carl. But Reiner had no trouble explaining the contradiction.
‘Well, they’re not,’ he said. ‘Because loving your father and looking up to your father doesn’t necessarily mean you’re feeling that back, that you’re feeling that from him,’ he said, noting that the older man didn’t really know him as a boy and young man, let alone lavish praise on him.
Rob Reiner had candidly spoken about his own painful, complicated relationship with his late father, Carl Reiner, months before his shocking murder
The legendary film director was determined to be a different kind of parent to his own children, specifically, his troubled, drug-addict son Nick
Carl Reiner, who died in 2020 aged 98, was a comic and actor who performed alongside Sid Caesar before creating The Dick Van Dyke Show and going on to direct successful comedies including The Jerk, Oh, God! and All of Me, among others.
Gross went on to ask about Reiner’s relationship with Nick, whose long history of substance abuse was the subject of Being Charlie, a semi-biographical film about a privileged drug addict child of a high-profile actor turned politician, on which the father and son collaborated in 2015.
‘Did you feel like your son was sending you the message that you were sometimes too busy to pay attention to him?’ Gross asked.
‘I was never, ever too busy,’ Reiner answered, unequivocally. ‘I mean, if anything, I was the other way.
‘I was more hands-on and trying to do whatever I thought I could do to help.’
Rob was quick to note that Nick had turned his life around since the years that inspired him to co-write the film with Matt Elisofon, a friend from rehab.
‘He’s been great. He hasn’t been doing drugs for over six years.
Rob and wife Michele shared three children, Jake, Nick, and Romy; pictured at the premiere of Rumor Has It in 2005
The Reiner family all shared their support for Romy at her high school graduation
‘I mean, he’s in a really good place…,’ he said.
Rob Reiner was born in 1947, the eldest of three children. His sister Annie, is an artist, poet, playwright, painter and psychoanalyst, and brother Lucas is a painter, printmaker, photographer and filmmaker. Both live near the home where Rob and Michele were killed.
Estelle, their mother, was an actress and singer, best remembered for her late-career cameo appearance in Reiner’s famed 1989 romcom, When Harry Met Sally.
She delivered the legendary line: ‘I’ll have what she’s having,’ in the famous scene in which Meg Ryan’s character faked an orgasm in a deli. Estelle died at age 84 in 2008.
Rob revered his dad, even announcing at age eight, that he wanted to change his name to Carl.
‘I loved him so much, I just wanted to be like him and I wanted to do what he did and I just looked up to him so much,’ he told Gross.
Nick is charged with murdering his parents
Nick was in court Wednesday wearing a blue anti-suicide vest, it was his first appearance since the death of his parents. He has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder
The couple was killed inside their mansion in Brentwood, a ritzy neighborhood in Los Angeles on December 14
He talked about yearning for his father’s validation, and finally earning it after directing a version of Jean Paul Sartre’s play, ‘No Exit,’ at a Los Angeles theater at age 19.
‘He came backstage after the performance. And he looked me in the eye, and he said, that was good. No bull****. And that’s the first time he ever said anything like that to me,’ Reiner said.
Reiner went on to make a name for himself, at first with his Emmy-winning role as Mike ‘Meathead’ Stivic, the liberal, college-educated son-in-law of Archie Bunker in All in the Family, a sitcom largely about generational divides.
Norman Lear, who created the show, was a close friend of his father.
In his interview with Gross, Reiner spoke about finally differentiating himself from his dad when directing Stand By Me, which he later cited as his favorite piece of work partly because one of its characters, Gordie, felt similarly unloved and misunderstood by his father.
‘It wasn’t until I did Stand By Me that I really started to feel very separate and apart from my father,’ he told Gross.
‘And when it became successful, I said, oh, OK. I can go in the direction that I want to go in and not feel like I have to, you know, mirror everything my father has done up till then.’
In 2017, Rob and Carl Reiner became the first father and son pair to be honored together during a Hand and Footprint Ceremony at the TCL Chinese Theatre. Rob referred to his dad as his idol.
Reiner went on to follow in his father’s professional footsteps as a director and actor, getting his big break on CBS sitcom All in the Family, created by his dad’s close friend Norman Lear, pictured in 2017
The film director made no secret about his complicated relationship with his father, who he noted, despite his flaws, he loved deeply. Carl Reiner died in 2014
Reiner was a supportive father to his own four kids, including Tracy Reiner, 61, the daughter of his first-wife, actress Penny Marshall, who played Laverne on the sitcom Laverne & Shirley and died in 2018. Reiner adopted Tracy as a child.
‘I came from one of the greatest families ever and now I have a lot of flagpoles missing – people who held me up,’ she told the Daily Mail on Sunday in the hours after learning of Reiner’s murder.
Tracy, an on-again, off-again actress, has had small roles in several films connected to her family, including work by both her parents.
Rob, who gleaned his love of baseball from his father, shared it with Jake, 34, his eldest child with Michele. Reiner and Michele met while making When Harry Met Sally.
Jake, a former journalist, is an actor and writer. He told People in 2023 that he and his dad regularly attended games together and talked daily about their beloved Los Angeles Dodgers.
Social media posts by Romy Reiner, 28, Rob’s youngest child with Michele, show an exceptionally close and playful relationship in which father and daughter shared progressive politics.
She can be seen in one post giving him a home haircut as they joked about the possibility of her having a Brazilian butt lift to make her more ‘marketable’ in show business.
Jake and Romy issued a statement last week calling their parents’ deaths ‘horrific and devastating.’
Reiner was a supportive father to his own four kids, who include Tracy Reiner, 61, the daughter of his first-wife, actress Penny Marshall, who died in 2018. Reiner adopted Tracy as a child
Along with Nick, he shared daughter Romy and older son Jake Reiner, with his wife Michele
‘Words cannot even begin to describe the unimaginable pain we are experiencing every moment of the day,’ they wrote.
‘They weren’t just our parents,’ the pair continued. ‘They were our best friends.’
It was Rob’s relationship with his son Nick that has had by far the most scrutiny.
Rob and Michele realized that Nick had been using drugs just before his 15th birthday.
‘I was never angry,’ Rob told People. ‘I felt bad for him and I didn’t know what to do to help – and a lot of times parents don’t know what to do.’
The father-son duo did a string of joint interviews together in 2016 after the release of ‘Being Charlie.’
By that point, Nick had been in and out of nearly two dozen rehab programs and had cycled in and out of homelessness.
The film ended up being as much, if not more, about the father’s take on his son’s addiction as the son’s own experience.
‘Charlie, I know you’re angry at me and probably don’t want to hear this right now, but I do love you,’ the father, played by Cary Elwes, tells his son.
‘I’m sorry. Every expert with a desk and a diploma told me I had to be tough at you, but every time we sent you away to another one of those programs I saw you slipping away from us.
‘And all I could tell myself is that I’d rather have you alive and hating me than dead on the streets.’
A Daily Mail review of their promotional interviews shows Rob did most of the talking, acknowledging that the end result was more a film that he, as the director, envisioned than one that Nick, a co-writer, would have wanted.
Rob spoke about his insistence at points that Nick enroll in inpatient rehabilitation centers rather than programs in which he could continue living at home, as he wanted.
Although he said tough love didn’t come naturally to him, he relied on experts’ advice to practice it in hopes of helping his son break the cycle of addiction. He said he later realized what deep anger it triggered in Nick, and that working together on the film helped heal their relationship.
Nick sounded less upbeat about their collaboration, saying ‘there were disagreements’ and ‘at times it was really rough’ working with his father.
At one point, he said in an interview, ‘I really wasn’t sure I wanted to do this.’
Nick Reiner had a long history of substance abuse and had spoken about it publicly alongside his father
Rob and Michele Reiner were found dead in their home on Sunday with stab wounds. Their cause of death was a result of ‘multiple sharp force injuries,’ according to a report from the County of Los Angeles Department of Medical Examiner
His career in show business seems to have ended after that film and it is unclear what, if anything, has done for work in the decade since. He had been living in his parents’ guest house until Sunday.
One friend told the Daily Mail that Rob and Michele’s approach to Nick was ‘an approach of acceptance, of hope, like, “Nick is Nick and can be a pain, but we’re all 100 percent behind him”.
‘They really knew Nick, and saw him, and had enormous empathy and patience for him.’
A contemporary of Nick who has known the family since childhood said Nick was always uncomfortable with his status as a nepo baby and couldn’t seem to shake feelings of shame that he was somehow breaking a legacy set by his more brilliant and accomplished father and grandfather.
‘My sense was that he knew he failed to launch and hated himself for it,’ she said.
‘Nick came from one of the best, warmest, most loving families I know. But maybe all the love in the world couldn’t fix whatever he was going through.’
Nick appeared in court on Wednesday wearing an anti-suicide vest. Prosecutors have yet to announce whether they will seek the death penalty in the double-murder case against him.
His family has hired A-list defense attorney Alan Jackson. In their statement Wednesday, his brother and sister asked that speculation about him and the case be ‘tempered with compassion and humanity’ as authorities investigate what happened.
