Rob Reiner was 20 minutes right into a video podcast selling his new movie — a semi-autobiographical story of a well-known dad and his drug-addicted son — when the interviewer requested what his son Nick, who co-wrote the film, realized from it.
Reiner pointed simply off-screen. Nick, then 22, had been there the entire time.
“He’s proper right here. You may ask him,” Reiner stated within the 2016 interview with comic Paul Mecurio concerning the movie, “Being Charlie.”
“Oh, that’s your son!” a stunned Mecurio stated, inviting the lean younger man with thick black glasses to hitch the dialogue about “Being Charlie,” which is predicated on Nick’s experiences bouncing out and in of drug rehab as a youngster.
At instances quiet and seemingly uncomfortable, Nick let his father do a lot of the speaking. However when requested why he began utilizing medicine within the first place, he blamed the celebrity of his dad and his grandfather, the acclaimed director and comic Carl Reiner.
“I had no identification, and I had no passions,” Nick stated. “And I believe the explanation I had no identification was as a result of I’ve a well-known dad and a well-known grandpa, and that fame kind of informs who you’re. So, I wished to edge out my very own identification with a extra rebellious, indignant, drug-addicted kind of persona.”
On Sunday night time, Los Angeles law enforcement officials arrested Nick Reiner, 32, on suspicion of murdering his 78-year-old father and his mom, Michele Singer Reiner, a 70-year-old photographer and producer. The couple werer discovered lifeless at their Brentwood residence Sunday afternoon.
Household associates informed The Occasions that Nick had been dwelling in a guesthouse on his mother and father’ property and that his mom had develop into more and more involved about his psychological well being in latest weeks.
Pals additionally stated that Rob Reiner and his son received into an argument Saturday night at a celebration at Conan O’Brien’s residence and that folks there seen Nick appearing unusually. The household associates, who requested to not be recognized, stated the Reiners’ daughter, Romy, discovered her mother and father Sunday afternoon at their residence on Chadbourne Avenue.
Regulation enforcement sources informed The Occasions that there was no signal of pressured entry and that the Reiners had accidents per being stabbed. Nick Reiner was being held with out bail on the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, based on Los Angeles County sheriff’s inmate data.
Nick Reiner, born in 1993, is the second of three kids Rob Reiner had with Michele, whom he married in 1989 after assembly her on the set of the beloved romantic comedy “When Harry Met Sally,” which he directed.
When Rob Reiner was interviewed over lunch in 1998 by a Occasions columnist, Nick, then 5, tumbled across the desk, prompting his father to quip: “He’s floppy. He’s at all times shifting round. He was born like that. When he got here out, the physician stated, ‘This can be a squirmy one.’ ”
Quickly, the columnist famous, “Nick’s photographer mother, Michele … arrived to scoop him up.”
In interviews, Nick has stated that he and his dad — who was quieter at residence than he was in his public function — didn’t bond a lot when he was youthful.
Within the 2016 interview with Mecurio, Nick stated that he was listless and that “I had nothing to fill my time. I had nothing to stay up for.”
As a youngster, Nick struggled with heroin habit, biking out and in of rehabilitation facilities and experiencing bouts of homelessness.
He had gotten clear by 2015, when he co-wrote “Being Charlie,” a few drug-addicted younger man whose father is a chilly, former film star operating for governor of California. His father directed the movie, which was co-written with Matt Elisofon.
Through the movie’s press tour, Nick — who usually sat quietly as his father spoke — stated many features of the film have been impressed by their relationship, together with a line that the daddy character tells his son: “I’d moderately you hate me and also you be alive.”
After placing himself on the market with the movie, he stated within the interview with Mercurio, it was exhausting to see the general public bash him as “a spoiled white wealthy child.”
At that time, Rob interjected, saying: “Hear, I needed to speak to him about this. Hear, I do know what it’s prefer to be ‘the son of,’ and to have individuals assume sure issues about you, and it’s very, very troublesome.”
In public, Nick praised his mother and father for serving to him discover sobriety. However he additionally stated he felt responsible disappointing them and was attempting to determine his personal path.
Rob stated that making the film together with his son was therapeutic, permitting them to work via previous trauma and develop a more in-depth relationship.
Throughout a 2015 interview with The Occasions on the Toronto Worldwide Movie Pageant, the place the movie premiered, Rob stated he regretted valuing the recommendation of counselors over the voice of his son as he and his spouse tried to maintain Nick in rehab.
“When Nick would inform us that it wasn’t working for him, we wouldn’t pay attention,” he stated. “We have been determined, and since the individuals had diplomas on their wall, we listened to them after we ought to have been listening to our son.”
Michele added: “We have been so influenced by these individuals. They might inform us he’s a liar, that he was attempting to govern us. And we believed them.”
After the couple’s deaths, one household pal stated Rob and Michele “did the whole lot for Nick. Each remedy program, remedy classes and put apart their lives to save lots of Nick’s repeatedly.” The pal stated that they’d “by no means recognized a household so devoted to a toddler” and that “to have it finish this fashion is terrible.”
Within the pivotal Seventies sitcom “All within the Household,” Rob Reiner, within the function of Michael “Meathead” Stivic, performed a liberal younger man who usually butted heads together with his staunchly conservative, bigoted father-in-law, Archie Bunker, performed by Carroll O’Connor.
One 1977 episode, “Archie’s Bitter Tablet,” touches on habit, with Archie getting hooked on drugs as he copes with melancholy triggered by his new bar not getting a lot enterprise.
When Archie begins appearing irritable and erratic, stuffing pancakes into his pocket earlier than storming off to work one morning, Michael solemnly declares: “That man is on one thing.”
Little is publicly recognized about Nick’s life within the decade since “Being Charlie” premiered. In line with IMDb, he has not been listed in different film credit.
Nick appeared together with his household in September on the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood for the premiere of “Spinal Faucet II: The Finish Continues,” which his dad directed.
In August 2018, Nick did a return interview on “Dopey,” a podcast about habit and restoration, through which he described wrecking his mother and father’ guesthouse.
“I received completely spun out on uppers — I believe it was coke and one thing else — and I used to be up for days on finish, and I began punching out various things in my guesthouse,” together with a TV, he stated.
The incident, he stated, occurred across the time his mother and father informed him he needed to get out and go to rehab.
Nick stated in that interview that he was then “smoking a bit weed, taking a bit Adderall.” He stated that he was smoking pot “as a preventative measure” to cease himself from doing tougher medicine and that he was not being particularly productive.
However he stated that, a few 12 months earlier, he “received again on dope and different issues” and “wound up having a cocaine coronary heart assault” on an airplane.
The host informed him: “I additionally need you to take a shot at restoration once more someday, then you may name in and say how good your life is.”
Occasions workers writers Suhauna Hussain, Alexandra Del Rosario and Grace Toohey contributed to this report.
