Rob Reiner’s friend of 50 years has revealed the acclaimed director hid the details of his troubled son Nick’s life.
Alan Horn, who co-founded Castle Rock Entertainment with Reiner, told Erin Burnett on CNN’s OutFront that the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner still feel “very surreal.”
“It’s hard to get my mind around the fact that this did, in fact, happen. Our dear friends, Rob and Michele, were literally murdered. And when we first heard the news, we simply could not believe it,” Horn said. “It’s impossibly hard.”
Nick Reiner, 32, was detained by Los Angeles police on Sunday on suspicion of killing both his parents. He has suffered from mental health issues and drug addiction, and bounced between rehab and homelessness as a teenager.
“It was known to us and known to other people who were close to Rob and Michele that Nick had a substance abuse problem that goes back quite a long time,” Horn said on CNN. “But they were all working on it together.”
Movie industry executive Horn also said it was not an issue the Reiners discussed.
“Rob and Michele kept this family matter rather personal and at least as far as we were concerned, close to the vest, he didn‘t talk much about it,” he noted.
Rob and Nick Reiner worked on the semi-autobiographical movie Being Charlie in 2015, the story of a teen who struggles with addiction and rehab.
Horn said the movie “dealt thematically with exactly the same subject” as Nick Reiner was going through.
“So we were all aware that there was an issue they were dealing with. But I could never have guessed that it would come to this. Never.”
Nick Reiner told People in 2016 that he made his first visit to rehab at 15 and would return 17 more times. He became homeless due to his refusal to return to rehab.
More details about the grisly double murder have come to light. Reiner and his wife got into a “very loud argument” with their troubled son at Conan O’Brien’s Christmas party—hours before police say they were killed in their Los Angeles home, insiders said.
Sources told TMZ that Rob, 78, and Michele, 68, left the party on Saturday after the altercation. The couple was found dead in their Brentwood home on Sunday afternoon.
A longtime neighbor of the Reiners told the New York Post that this “is not the first time their son has been violent.”
Reiner said in 2015 that he regretted listening to counselors more than he did to Nick. He said directing Being Charlie, which he said was the “most personal” of his long list of films, made him realize his own shortcomings as a father.
“When Nick would tell us that it wasn’t working for him, we wouldn’t listen,” he told the L.A. Times. “We were desperate, and because the people had diplomas on their wall, we listened to them when we should have been listening to our son.”
As well as acting in All in the Family, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Sleepless in Seattle, Reiner directed classic movies including This Is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, and Stand By Me.
