During his Late Night With Seth Meyers monologue on Monday night, Meyers recalled watching Reiner’s directorial debut at age 11 or 12 on HBO alongside his parents on a living room couch, and suddenly realizing what comedic storytelling could be.
“I feel as though [Reiner] reached out of the television to me, and I’m sure so many other people like me, and said, ‘You should do this. You should try this in your life. It’s as much fun as it looks,” Meyers recalled.
Reiner and wife Michele Reiner were killed on Sunday in their Los Angeles home. Their son, Nick Reiner, has been arrested and booked on suspicion of murder and is being held without bail.
Meyers said he didn’t know the Reiners well, but had spent time with them, “and they were delightful people to be in a room with.” He also shared a story about attending Norman Lear’s 100th birthday and the comedic giant at one point being lost for words to answer an audience question about how his Hollywood career had started.
“We were all patiently waiting. And then Rob just yelled out from the back of the room. He said, ‘Norman, tell them the story of how you once hid in a birthday present!’” Reiner kept peppering Lear for more career recollections because, as Meyers explained, “Rob had this reputation for getting the best out of people, and if you watch his films, you know that is something he had this skill with.
“But to see him in person and know that’s what it was like in his real life as well, it was just truly special to see,” Meyers added.
“I feared this was something he was going to do. But it was even worse than I could have imagined. The President made it about himself, because he’s incapable about making it about anything else,” Meyers insisted. He added Trump had said “the Reiners were reportedly murdered because of their feelings about him, even though no one had reported that.”
Meyers said when he first heard of the deaths, he thought, “’Oh My God, what if this happened because of Rob and Michele’s politics?’ And then I thought, ‘What if it happened because they were Jewish?’ And what a terrible time we live in where these are the thoughts that rationally come into one’s head when something like this happens, and what a good time it would be to have a leader with a moral compass.”
Before offering condolences to the Reiner family, Meyers celebrated Rob Reiner as “a man who set an example, and there’s such a value to that, and we have to do everything we can to not make setting an example a lost art.”
Fellow late night host Jimmy Kimmel also condemned Trump over the comments on his Monday show, saying, in part, “What we need in a time like this, besides common sense when it comes to guns and mental healthcare, is compassion and leadership. We did not get that from our president because he has none of it to give. Instead we got a fool rambling about nonsense, we got a brief moment of respect for our friends in Australia, we got a brief moment of condolence followed by a ‘thing happened’ for the students at Brown and for Rob and Michele Reiner.”
