Nick Reiner: Self-Made Monster Part 2 - What Rob Told the Radio

Tony Brueski (0:00)

September 2025, a public radio studio in Los Angeles. Rob Reiner is 78 years old. He is there to talk about the sequel to SpinalTap, 41 years after the original, and he is in the mood for it, loose and funny.

Eventually, the interviewer asks about his son. He's been great, Rob says. Nick hasn't done drugs in over six years. He's in a really good place.

And then the father does what he had been doing for 32 years. He takes the blame. I'm sure I made mistakes, he says.

He wants the audience to know he was never, ever too busy for his son, not like the father in the movie. They've talked about it, he says, he and Nick.

Three months later, a family friend would tell a reporter that in the weeks before Christmas, Rob had been telling people he was scared for Nick and scared that his son's mental state was deteriorating. A tabloid went further. An account passed from a memorial service to a reporter had Rob, at a holiday party, telling a guest he was petrified of his own son. Another guest said he never said it. What is not disputed is this.

By the Sunday after that party, Rob and Michele Reiner were dead.

The nine years between the radio studio and the fear are the years when the two people who never walked away found out what it costs to stay. The Spring of 2016 There is a family photograph from that year. Rob, Michele, Jake, Romy and Nick, all five of them, smiling, a year after Toronto.

Being Charlie opened in American theaters on May 6

Two days earlier, father and son sat side by side on a stage in New York for a web interview series selling a movie about recovery. Nick said the film had brought them closer. He'd been home a long time now. He'd acclimated. On a comedian's podcast that spring, he said the sentence he is going to have to keep. I'm lucky. I have parents that care about me.

Rob called his son the heart and soul of the movie. Brilliant, talented. He told a wire service it had been among the most satisfying creative experiences of his life. The movie made $32,964 worldwide. The reviews from Toronto had followed it home. Nick had a plan. He went on Howard Stern's show with his father and talked about show business as the next thing. He told Public Radio he didn't want to collaborate with his father again right away. He wanted to be independent. Independence, in Brentwood, comes with a pool. He moved into the guest house behind his parents' home on an estate worth $13.5 million.

He was reportedly receiving an allowance of $10,000 a month. There is no record of a job. There is no second film. His IMDB page goes quiet in 2016 and never makes another sound. That was the ending his father had directed. It didn't hold. In September 2016, Nick walked into a small studio to record a podcast called Dopey, two recovering addicts talking about the dark comedy of the life. The host, David Mannheim, had heard him on Stern. Nick was, Mannheim wrote later, their first and only celebrity. His approach to recovery was different from theirs. He called it harm reduction, which in plain terms means, you don't try to quit everything, you try to stay off the drugs that kill you. He'd admit to smoking weed and drinking a bit while trying to stay away from cocaine, meth, and heroin. He did, Mannheim remembered, a very good impression of Rob Reiner telling his son that everything would be okay.

Mannheim thought living up to the Reiner name was next to impossible, and he said so in print. Nick agreed with people who said that about him, he always had. Mannheim asked him for a favor at the end, would Nick give a Dopey hat to his dad? Mannheim would write, years later, that he regretted being one more person who wanted Rob Reiner's attention more than Nick's. Even the people who liked him wanted his father.

Within a year, the harm reduction had become something else. He told the story himself, back on Dopey in 2018, laughing. It would be replayed everywhere after the deaths. He had gotten, in his words, totally spun out on uppers, awake for days. And when his parents told him he had to leave the guest house and go back to treatment, he went, as he put it, ten rounds with the guest house. He punched out the television, he punched out a lamp, everything in it, he said, got wrecked. His parents' property, his rage, their repair bill. They repaired the guest house as they would every time. In the same stretch, by his account, he was back on heroin. There was another intervention and a flight to Boston for treatment. On the plane, by his account, he passed out with what he later called a cocaine heart attack and woke up in a hospital. Somebody booked that flight, somebody sat in that waiting room, and somebody paid that bill. Nick got a story out of it, the kind he liked to tell into a microphone. Everyone around him got a night they would never forget. Mannheim never saw him in person again. On their last call, he wrote, Nick got defensive.