Rob Reiner and Nick Reiner’s ‘Being Charlie’ Interviews Reveal Addiction

Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner’s murders on Sunday were shocking for many reasons – their sheer brutality, the sad fact that it involved one of Hollywood’s gentlest souls, and that the couple’s son, Nick Reiner, is allegedly the killer. I had seen a brief glimpse into their father-son dynamic when I interviewed Rob and Nick when they were at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival with “Being Charlie,” a drama based on Nick’s struggle to get sober.

We talked for maybe 45 minutes, and the resulting piece was all-too brief, but I’ve been turning that interview, as well as the three or four others I conducted with Rob in my career, over in my head since the news broke. It’s impossible to comprehend what would make someone murder anyone, let alone their parents. But in sorting through these stray encounters, I’ve been reflecting on how human and hopeful Rob and Nick seemed at the festival.

I remember finding “Being Charlie,” which is about the drug-addicted son of an actor turned congressional candidate (a clear stand-in for Rob), to be well-intentioned, but undercooked. However, talking with the Reiners it was impossible not to be moved by the personal story that inspired it. Nick had co-written the script for the film, and Rob had directed the picture, with the two evidently searching for some kind of reconciliation.  

“Something would happen in the script, and that would trigger stuff that was going on with us,” Rob told me. “He had written things between the father and the son that had happened. I had said to him, ‘I’d rather you hate me than you be dead in the street.’” 

For his part, Nick, who seemed shy, said he hoped that “Being Charlie” would highlight some of the “ridiculousness” he experienced during one failed rehab stint after another. Like Rob, he implied that their relationship had been strained, but that working together had been cathartic. That was never clearer than in the final conversation between an estranged father and son that Nick had conceived for the film, one that was intended to signal a kind of closure.  

“Towards the end of shooting, we were doing a scene, and I said, ‘Why doesn’t Charlie go up and hug his dad,’” Nick told me. “That meant a lot to my dad, because it was sort of like I was accepting him back in.” 

Both Rob and Nick argued that the recovery programs that they’d turned to since Nick was 15 had failed them. They hadn’t come up with a way to keep Nick off drugs, and Rob felt he hadn’t appreciated his son’s objections to the doctors and experts who had tried to help him beat his addictions. It was clear that Rob felt very guilty. His celebrity and access to resources hadn’t been enough to prevent his son from getting into drugs – like so many other people around the world, addiction had torn their family apart.  

I talked to Rob several times over the years – most recently when he was relaunching Castle Rock and looking for investors at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. He was affable, funny and genuine, often interrupting our interviews to say something to Michele, who would flit in and out of the room, or asking her to jog his memory about some detail or another. In talking to people who knew the couple far better than I did, it was clear they were joined at the hip – artistically, spiritually, professionally – and believed in treating people with decency and grace.  

They took their responsibility to others seriously (my colleague Daniel D’Addario correctly labeled Rob Reiner “one of Hollywood’s great humanists”), getting involved in numerous social justice causes. And given the outpouring of affection that has sprung up from the many, many people who had worked with Rob and Michele over the years, working with them meant having a friend for life.  

I kept thinking about one other encounter I had with Rob, when I wrote an oral history of one of my favorite movies, “Stand by Me.” I remember him talking in a haunted fashion about running into River Phoenix in the years after the film came out. He was clearly alarmed by the choices that the young, sweet, sensitive man had made since they worked together on the movie.  

“He was already getting into drugs,” Reiner said. “I remember him coming to visit me in a hotel somewhere and he was like really high, and I thought, ‘Ay, ay, ay, what the hell is going on with this kid?’” 

He went on to share how sad he felt when he heard about River’s death of an overdose, the way his heart broke for the young man’s family, and his frustration at all the missed roles that Phoenix never got to play because his life ended too soon. And I sensed regret that nobody had been able to pull River out of the spiral of addiction.  

I know many parents will do anything to help their children, and it sounds like Rob and Michele were no exceptions. But having seen Hollywood fail to rescue one young person he cared about must have only reinforced Rob Reiner’s commitment to save his own son. In the end, that wouldn’t be enough.