Conan O’Brien is finally opening up about the party at his home where Rob Reiner, his wife Michele Singer Reiner, and their son Nick Reiner spent the late couple’s last evening before their tragic deaths the next day in December.
“I knew Rob and Michele, and then increasingly got closer and closer to them,” O’Brien told The New Yorker Radio Hour on Friday. “And we were, I was seeing them a lot. My wife and I were seeing them a lot. To have that experience of saying goodnight to somebody and having them leave and then find out the next day that they’re gone... I think I was in shock for quite a while afterwards.”
“That was just, it was, I mean, there’s no other word for it,” he continued. “It’s just very, it’s so awful. It’s just so awful.”
Immediately after the gruesome killings of the film directing legend and his wife at their Brentwood home on Dec. 14, reports emerged that the couple had spent their previous evening at O’Brien’s party. The couple’s son, Nick Reiner, 32, who has since been charged with their murders, accompanied his parents to the party, where a source said they brought him to “keep an eye” on him.
Nick Reiner is being held without bail at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles. He had a history of addiction struggles, which his father believed in September had resolved, according to an interview at the time with NPR.
A source told TMZ that Nick Reiner had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was getting treatment from a specialized facility to address both his addiction and schizophrenia at the time of the killings. The source also claimed Reiner’s medication caused “erratic and dangerous” behavior.
O’Brien sidestepped speculation and reflected on what the loss of his friend has been like in the new interview.
“I think about how Rob felt about things that are happening in the country, how involved he was, how much he put himself out there,” he said. “And to have that voice go quiet in an instant is still hard for me to comprehend.”
O’Brien went on to call Reiner “larger than life.”
“I just keep mulling over the body of work. I think it’s seven movies that Rob Reiner made in quick succession that are classics,” he said of the director, who logged film classics, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, and many more across the 1980s and ’90s. “Now, to be thought of as a great director, I think if you can make one great movie, that’s impressive. It’s an almost impossible feat.”
“To make two means that you’re one of the greats,” O’Brien added. “To make seven, in like a nine-year, 10-year, 11-year period, is insanity.”
