The Bear included a subtle tribute to the late actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner in its final episode, released this week.
Reiner, who guest-starred in the award-winning dramedy’s fourth season, was killed along with his wife Michele Singer Reiner at their home last December. Their son, Nick Reiner, is set to face trial later this year after pleading not guilty to the murders.
The final episode of The Bear features phone call with Reiner’s character, Albert Schnurr – though he is neither seen nor heard.
Spoilers follow for the season finale of The Bear.
In the finale, titled “The Original Beef of Chicagoland”, restaurant cook Ebra (Edwin Lee Gibson) phones Albert to inform him about the future.
“We are in business,” he tells him. “It’s perfect. I will have all the documents, email it to you immediately. Anything else I can do?”
We see Ebra pause, before responding “As you wish” – a line that fans of Reiner’s work will be very familiar with.
The phrase is memorably uttered by Cary Elwes’s character in the 1987 film The Princess Bride, which Reiner directed.
Reiner’s death last year sent shockwaves throughout the entertainment industry. Tributes from friends and collaborators poured in for the filmmaker – whose “golden run” of directorial efforts in the 1980s and early 1990s also included modern classics such as This is Spinal Tap (1984), Stand By Me (1986), When Harry Met Sally… (1989) and Misery (1990).
This year, a trio of actors from the coming-of-age drama Stand By Me , Jerry O’Connell, Corey Feldman, and Wil Wheaton, reunited for a series of anniversary screenings.
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Speaking to Associated Press, Wheaton talked about the solace he had found in being with his former co-stars in the wake of Reiner’s death. “My first thought was, ‘I am so glad that I have a place to land with my grief,’” he said. “There’s not a lot of other people in the world who really know what this feels like.
“We know how much Rob loved Stand by Me. We know what it meant to him.”
Director Martin Scorsese, a friend of the Reiners, authored a tribute published on Christmas Day by The New York Times.
“The only thing that will help me to accept [their deaths] is the passing of time,” he wrote. “So, like all of their loved ones and their friends – and these were people with many, many friends – I have to be allowed to imagine them alive and well … and that one day, I’ll be at a dinner or a party and find myself seated next to Rob, and I’ll hear his laugh and see his beatific face and laugh at his stories and relish his natural comic timing, and feel lucky all over again to have him as a friend.”
