Nick Reiner spoke openly about addiction before arrest

LOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office is reviewing evidence in the deaths of film director and actor Rob Reiner and producer Michele Singer Reiner. Police say the couple’s son Nick Reiner was arrested Sunday night and booked for murder. He is being held without bail and is due to appear in court for charges. Online records that previously listed a bail for $4 million have since been updated.

Reiner was born in Los Angeles 32 years ago, one of Rob Reiner’s four children. His grandfather, Carl Reiner, was a comedy legend during the early days of television.

Nick Reiner had been open about his struggles, saying he started using drugs when he was young; He said he was just 15 when he began spending years in and out of rehab and addiction treatment centers.

“I am a spoiled, white, rich kid from a Hollywood family,” he told NPR in 2016. “But I think it’s even more of a testament to how powerful drugs can be that you don’t care about any of that stuff.”

Reiner has been candid about using all kinds of drugs, including methamphetamine and heroin, and about his many relapses.

On the podcast “Dopey” in 2016, he talked about how he hated getting sober and how he sometimes chose to be homeless rather than go back to rehab.

Ten years ago, after years of bouncing in and out of halfway homes and treatment centers, Reiner decided to co-write a screenplay based on some of his experiences. His father co-produced and directed the movie: Being Charlie, a semiautobiographical story about a troubled teen who has a turbulent relationship with his famous father, who is running for California governor.

“It was never about the drugs,” Charlie tells his father. “All I ever wanted was a way to kill the noise.”

In a key scene, Charlie’s father tells him he loves him and talks to him about supporting him through tough love. “Every expert with a desk and a diploma told me I had to be tough on you,” he says. “But every time we sent you away to another one of those programs, if I saw you slipping further away from us, all I could tell myself was ‘I’d rather have you alive and hating me than dead on the streets.'”

Rob Reiner told NPR that the collaboration was the most satisfying creative experience he’d ever had– “because I got to work with Nick. And even though we had struggled through some difficult times and the making of the movie certainly dredged those things up, it was also an opportunity to work through a lot of that stuff.”

For his part, Nick told NPR that making the movie was part of his long recovery journey.

“A lot of people that go through addictions of all kinds are kind of hard to love,” he said. “So I guess the character was to show how ugly it gets.”

In one scene, the character Charlie steals OxyContin from a sick, elderly woman who really needs it.

“I have definitely done things similar to that,” Reiner said. “I can’t say I’ve done that in quite some time, but when I was going through a lot of that stuff, sure, you don’t really think about anything. You throw your morals out of the window.”

The killings of Rob and Michele Reiner left friends and fans around the world stunned.

“I’m devastated,” says cinematographer Barry Markowitz, who shot Being Charlie and some of Rob Reiner’s other films.

Markowitz, a friend of the Reiners, called them a “stronger than strong” close-knit family. He says he used to stay with the family whenever he was in Los Angeles.

Markowitz painted a different picture of Nick Reiner.

He recalled a young man who loved basketball and had traveled to Europe to learn more about his family’s Jewish roots. He says he saw Nick and the family in L.A. just 10 days ago.

“[Nick] was going through some rough times for many years, but his soul was so pure and gentle,” Markowitz said. “He was on the upswing. Looked like a GQ model. I wish I could give you a tidbit or something, like ‘oh, he looked bad and this and that’– he didn’t. That’s what’s so spooky about mental illness.”