Jerry O’Connell said he was on thin ice with his wife and teenage daughters after he made offhanded remarks about Kamala Harris losing to Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
The Stand By Me star, 52, was on a recent episode of Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast, when the conversation turned political. He hesitated before deciding to recount his family’s outraged reaction to his criticism of Harris’s campaign.
“I said something along the lines of ‘there was no planning. This is what they get. There should have been a primary.’ I said something along those lines, you know, like I was just spit-balling ideas,” he said of Harris’s compressed 107-day campaign.
“My wife and daughters, without saying anything, became physical with me. They were filled with rage,” he claimed of his spouse since 2007, Rebecca Romijn, and their twin 17-year-old daughters.
“So if I am being careful with you in how I say things, yes, I live in California,” O’Connell said. “I live with not one, not two, but three people who, if I made any kind of joke, they’d become very angry with me.”
The Independent has contacted Romijn’s representative for comment.
Maher replied simply that he could not live that way. “Whatever household situation I’m in, I say what I truly think, and if it makes you angry, I’m sorry,” he said.
“We’ll have to work that out. But I am not going to tuck my tail between my legs and just shut the f*** up.”
Referencing their earlier conversation about how acclaimed director Rob Reiner encouraged O’Connell to abandon his mother’s insistence on staying quiet, and instead improvise on the set of Stand by Me, Maher added: “But what happened to Rob Reiner? Where is Rob Reiner’s ghost when you need him to be telling you, ‘More of that!’”
O’Connell had shared that, growing up as a hyperactive child, his mother used to tell him to “shut up” and sit on his hands. “My life, for three or four years, was me wanting to say something, make a joke about something,” he said, adding that he instead stayed silent and recited his mother’s mantra in his head.
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That changed when he worked with the late director on the 1986 coming-of-age classic, who encouraged him to ignore that advice and embrace improvisation.
Over the weekend, O’Connell appeared at the 2026 Oscars to pay tribute to Reiner, who was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home, alongside his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, in December 2025.
He was joined by 16 other stars of Reiner’s films as they walked out on stage to honor the beloved filmmaker.
