When the news broke on Sunday night that the legendary director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele had been found stabbed to death in their Los Angeles home, the response from the couple’s Hollywood friends and film fans alike was one of outright horror. Reiner, the 78-year-old sitcom actor turned director of beloved movies such as The Princess Bride, This Is Spinal Tap and When Harry Met Sally, had brought so much happiness to so many cinemagoers that his and his wife’s lives should come to such a harrowing end seemed near-impossible to compute.
But in the hours and days that followed, the tragedy became yet more shocking. On Monday, Los Angeles police confirmed that they had arrested the couple’s son, Nick Reiner, on suspicion of murder; and on Tuesday, Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman announced that the 32-year-old will be charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
Since his teens, Nick had grappled with addiction to heroin and other drugs, his life a sequence of rehab stays, relapse and periods of sobriety. The family hadn’t kept his troubles a secret, by any means: in 2015, Rob directed a movie co-written by his son, inspired by Nick’s experiences. But the film – and the “catharsis” that Rob said he experienced while working on it – could only provide closure briefly, and did not mark the end of his struggles.
Beyond the promotional circuit for Being Charlie, little is known about the private life of this scion of Hollywood royalty. But his parents Rob and Michele’s love story was the stuff of industry legend. The actor-turned-director, whose father Carl had created The Dick Van Dyke Show and was one-half of a comedy double act with Mel Brooks, had been divorced for almost a decade when he started working with Nora Ephron on the romcom When Harry Met Sally. His pessimism about relationships shaped the movie’s original ending, in which the title characters didn’t get together. But during filming, he met and fell in love with photographer Michele, and changed the film’s finale accordingly, his faith in romance restored.
Their first son, Jake, was born in 1991, followed by Nick in 1993 and daughter Romy in 1997 (Reiner had also previously adopted Tracy, the daughter of his first wife, Penny Marshall, and remained close to her even after the couple’s split). The children attended the progressive Wildwood School in Los Angeles, an institution that has proved a popular choice for A-list parents, with the likes of Demi Moore, Meryl Streep, Steven Spielberg and Dustin Hoffman all sending kids there (Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter Ella Emhoff is also an alumna).
Growing up in a wealthy, film industry milieu, the Reiner offspring inevitably mixed with fellow members of Hollywood dynasties: according to The New Yorker, Nick was a childhood friend of Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of Arnold and a breakout star of The White Lotus’s third season. The Reiners’ middle child, though, seemed to face behavioural problems from an early age.
Alanna Zabel, a celebrity yoga instructor, has recently spoken about how she was hired to work with the “disruptive” young Nick in the early 2000s. “Nicky would barge in like the world was on fire, screaming, into our yoga sessions,” she told the Daily Mail, adding that she had “never seen a child like it”. Zabel later wrote a children’s book about a troubled boy named “Little Nicky”, apparently inspired by her former pupil.
Just a few years later, around the time of his 15th birthday, Nick would be sent to rehab for the first time by his parents, who were concerned about his spiralling drug use. Over the course of the next four years, he would have 17 further stays in similar institutions across the United States. In between those stints, in the periods when he refused treatment, he spent time on the streets and in homeless shelters. “If I wanted to do it my way and not go to the programs they were suggesting, then I had to be homeless,” he told People.
Rob and Michele, the director later recalled, ended up adopting “tough love” tactics when facing their son’s addiction, which they later regretted. “When Nick would tell us that it wasn’t working for him, we wouldn’t listen,” he told the LA Times. “We were desperate and because the people had diplomas on their walls, we listened to them when we should have been listening to our son.”
But for all that Nick didn’t agree with their approach, he seemed to acknowledge that they had good intentions. “I think I’m lucky in the sense that I have parents that care about me, and because of that, when I would go out and do things like drugs and stuff like that, I’d feel a tremendous amount of guilt,” he said in a podcast interview in 2016.
During one of his rehab stints, Nick met Matt Elisofon, who was also recovering from addiction. The pair began working on a pilot script about their experiences, which would eventually become the semi-autobiographical film Being Charlie. In it, Nick Robinson plays Charlie, the addict son of an actor (Cary Elwes) who is planning a campaign to become state governor, and needs his child to clean up his act accordingly. Like Nick, Charlie is shunted from rehab to rehab but struggles to engage with treatment before eventually reaching a tentative reconciliation with his dad.
The creative process wasn’t easy for the pair: Rob was candid about the “disagreements” that they faced, admitting that “at times it was really rough”. However, he was adamant that their collaboration had brought them closer together and helped him to better understand his son. “Working on this with Nick was like being in therapy with him,” he said. “I learned how to be his father.”
But during the film’s promotional cycle, Nick seemed more ambivalent, revealing that he “wasn’t really sure that [he] wanted to do this” and acknowledging that bringing parts of his life to the screen would sometimes “get overwhelming for me”. Speaking to the LA Times after the film’s debut, he remarked bluntly: “I never thought I’d capitalise on rehab.”
The critical response to Being Charlie was mixed, with one review from The Hollywood Reporter suggesting that there were “two warring agendas” at play in the film. “The son/addict side”, the critic wrote, wants “to point out that recovery is a long, grinding process that never magically ends”, whereas the “dad viewpoint” is “all about seeking closure, making everything all better and moving on to some elusive next stage where life can resume as normal once a handily cathartic rock bottom has been endured”.
If the movie ended on a tentatively positive note, real life was inevitably far more complicated. Nick was sober at the time of Being Charlie’s release, but would go on to relapse. In a 2018 appearance on the Dopey podcast, he recalled a recent episode when he had “got totally spun out on uppers” and “started punching out different things” in his parents’ guesthouse, destroying the TV and a lamp before, ultimately, “everything in the guesthouse got wrecked”.
Dopey host David Manheim, who struck up a brief friendship with Nick, recently speculated that he may have struggled with the idea of living up to his family’s creative legacy. “I think big picture, when you’re up against Rob Reiner and Carl Reiner, and you’re a struggling drug addict, the pressure is immense,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.
Manheim’s remarks echoed comments made almost a decade ago by Nick, during another podcast appearance with his father. When the host asked him why he started using drugs at such a young age, he alluded to his family’s reputation. “I had no identity, and I had no passions,” he said. “And I think the reason I had no identity was because I had a famous dad and a famous grandpa, and that fame sort of informs who you are. So I wanted to edge out my own identity with a more rebellious, angry, drug-addicted sort of persona.”
In spite of these troubles, the Reiners remained a tight-knit family with a “stronger than strong” bond, as their friend Barry Markowitz, a cinematographer on Being Charlie, has put it. “They loved their kids so much, and they never stopped trying to be really good parents,” the journalist Maria Shriver, ex-wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger and a close friend of the couple, wrote after their death.
Their youngest child, Romy, an actor and writer, reportedly lived just across the street from her parents in Brentwood. She would regularly post sweet photos and videos of them on her social media accounts, and in a family interview to mark the release of Being Charlie, called Nick her “best friend”. Her middle brother was reportedly in and out of the family guesthouse for years as his health waxed and waned: “It had been like a revolving door all his adult life,” a source told the Daily Mail.
In September, the entire family turned out to support Rob at the premiere of the long-awaited Spinal Tap sequel, The End Continues, with Romy and Nick joined by their elder brother Jake, a journalist turned actor, and his partner Maria. It would be their last public appearance together.
Although the Reiners (bar Nick) smiled for the cameras, reports have since suggested that tensions between the parents and their middle child had been rising for a few months, after Nick had once again moved back into the guesthouse. It’s thought that Rob and Michele attended TV star Conan O’Brien’s annual Christmas party on the night before their murder, where Nick reportedly became embroiled in a heated row with his father. “Nick was freaking everyone out, acting crazy, kept asking people if they were famous,” a source told People.
In a scene from Being Charlie, David, the character based on Rob Reiner, tells his rehab refusenik son, “I’d rather you hate me and you be alive” than have his addiction kill him. The line was apparently taken verbatim from an argument shared by the real-life father-son duo. In the wake of this brutal tragedy, that plaintive remark seems horribly poignant.
