Hollywood director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele had every reason to be at Conan O’Brien’s festive early Christmas party in the Pacific Palisades on Saturday night, where guests were decked out in suits and fancy dresses. But one stood out.
Their 32-year-old son Nick, who had been in rehab at least 17 times for addiction and mental health struggles, “showed up to the very formal party in a hoodie,” a source told TMZ on Monday.
“Nick was freaking everyone out, acting crazy, kept asking people if they were famous,’’ another source told People.
Even a brooding, incoherent Nick Reiner may have been known to some of the guests, but he only spoke at length with two – his famous father, and his mom, a producer and photographer. What ensued was a “very loud argument” – and certainly not the first the trio ever had, the latest flashpoint of a volatile relationship that the father and son had documented and collaborated on for the quasi-autobiographical 2015 film “Being Charlie.”
What was said, no one has yet disclosed – though it was loud enough that several guests heard it, multiple outlets reported, citing anonymous partygoers. Reps for O’Brien and the Reiners did not immediately return requests for comment Monday evening.
And it wouldn’t have mattered much except for the news of the following day.
That was when the Reiners’ youngest daughter, 28-year-old Romy, discovered her parents’ lifeless bodies at their Brentwood home, the victims of a readily apparent knife attack. She immediately suspected her older brother, corroborated Monday when police said he was responsible for their deaths.
Romy Reiner, an aspiring actress and producer who had posted just after a Thanksgiving beach getaway that she was “thankful for my family,” told police Nick had been recently living in their parents guest house, was “dangerous” and should be considered a suspect, sources told TMZ.
Nick was indeed back home, after numerous bouts of homelessness in Maine, New Jersey, Boston, Miami and other faraway places over the years. After a period of sobriety, he had been recently suspected of using again – his main vices being opioids and heroin – and his parents had recently told a family friend who spoke with the New York Post that he had deteriorated to a “low point.”
After years of dealing with their addict son’s violent outbursts, the Reiners were gravely concerned.
“These poor people did everything to help this kid,” the friend, who lives a few blocks away from the Reiner home, which sits behind a tall white gate in the exclusive, tight-knit community, told the Post.
“Nick’s problem was always drugs,” said another family friend who has known Nick since he was a child, speaking on condition of anonymity.
It’s not known whether Nick Reiner arrived separately to O’Brien’s holiday party, but multiple outlets reported that the Reiners left sometime shortly after the shouting match.
Since he brought “The Tonight Show” from New York in 2011, O’Brien has lived in the Pacific Palisades, and his family was among those who evacuated during the rampaging Los Angeles wildfires of early 2025. His mansion was spared by the hands of firefighters the comedian hailed as heroes.
Investigators have not disclosed when they thought the attack took place, just a 10-minute drive away in Brentwood. Romy found her parents’ bodies on Sunday just after 3 p.m., and immediately after calling police, called her parents’ close friends Billy Crystal and his wife Janice – who raced to the nearby house and saw the carnage, TMZ reported Monday.
By early evening, word got out that two people in the house matching the Reiners’ ages were found dead, and news crews and reporters began to set up in the 200 block of South Chadbourne Avenue where the Reiners had lived for years, buying the home where his mentor Norman Lear and his wife Lyn had lived — and before that, Henry Fonda.
At one point, Alan Hamilton, chief of detectives at the LAPD, told the gathered press that there was no suspect in custody and an investigation had yet to begin. But behind the scenes, at approximately 9:15 p.m., Nick Reiner was arrested and booked for murder after being briefly questioned.
“The investigation further revealed that Nick Reiner, the 32-year-old son of Robert and Michele Reiner, was responsible for their deaths,” the LAPD announced in a Monday statement. The unequivocal nature of that wording is highly unusual – and Nick Reiner’s initial $4 million bail was swiftly revoked.
The case will go to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office on Tuesday, the statement concluded.
Rob Reiner, who had one of the most successful runs of any director with films like “The Princess Bride,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “This Is Spinal Tap” (and its September sequel, his final film), wasn’t as busy as he used to be, with five projects still listed in deep development at his Castle Rock Entertainment shingle. He was attached as a producer on the screenplay “Airtight,” as well as the film projects “El Fuego Caliente,” “Travel Writing” and “Whiskey River,” some trapped in various pre-production stages for 20 years or more.
His most active projects were in TV, where Reiner recently appeared in Season 4 of “The Bear” and was serving as an executive producer on a proposed “Fawlty Towers” reboot with John Cleese attached, but no start-date or distributor announced.
Nick Reiner’s publicly documented credits never went much past “Being Charlie,” for which he was listed as a co-writer. He and fellow writer Matt Elisofon – whom he met in rehab – developed the script, drawing on Nick’s personal struggles with drug addiction, rehab and family tension. His father, who directed the film, spoke openly about the family’s ordeal in their joint interviews, calling it semi-autobiographical and therapeutic.
Released to theaters in 2016, the film is filled with moments of now-intensified poignancy, including several scenes where the title character (played by Nick Robinson) clashes with his father (“Princess Bride” star Cary Elwes) over his struggles with drugs. The father, David Mills, is a former Hollywood megastar of a pirate-themed franchise who is running for governor of California.
“Do you know how many people you have to stab with fake swords to get one of these?” Charlie says in one scene as he introduces his new girlfriend, whom he’d met in rehab, to the family’s opulent beach home.
Rob Reiner spoke openly during press tours about regretting that he had forced his son to stay in treatment facilities, while he bounced between treatment, the streets and occasional stays at home.
“[Being Charlie] forced me to have to see more clearly, and understand more deeply, what Nick had gone through,” Rob Reiner said in a joint interview with his son in a 2016. “And, I think it forced him to see things that I had experienced during this process.”
But as an endpoint for Nick Reiner’s troubles with drugs, “Being Charlie” would not hold. During a 2018 appearance on the “Dopey” podcast, he told host David Manheim, a close friend, that he was not sober, admitting that he’d been smoking marijuana and taking Adderall, and had relapsed on heroin and other hard drugs just the year before, leading to a “cocaine heart attack” during an intervention.
He recounted how he had once rampaged through his family’s guest house, holed up for days with cocaine and other substances, repeatedly punching the television and damaging furniture until “just everything got wrecked.”
“I got totally spun out on uppers – coke and something else – I was up for days on end,” he said. “I started punching different things in my guest house. I started with the tv, went over to the lamp. Everything in the guest house got wrecked.”
“Weren’t your folks pissed?” asked Manheim.
“Yep, they told me I had to go.”
Once again, he was expelled from his parents’ properties.
As he had done so many times, Nick Reiner entered yet another treatment facility, did the work necessary to take another shot at sober living, and was eventually welcomed back into the family fold.
