It was one of Hollywood’s most cherished seasonal get-togethers: chat show host Conan O’Brien’s star-studded Christmas party.

But the convivial atmosphere of this year’s bash on Saturday night at O’Brien’s mansion in the Pacific Palisades was rudely interrupted by a blazing row.

The ‘very loud’ argument between acclaimed film director Rob Reiner and his 32-year-old son, Nick, alarmed fellow guests, some of whom were convinced the younger Reiner was ‘on something’.

While other guests had dressed to the nines, he was wearing a scruffy hoodie and behaving ‘creepily’. As one witness put it: ‘Nick was freaking everyone out, acting crazy.’

The middle child of the director of When Harry Met Sally, A Few Good Men, The Princess Bride and This Is Spinal Tap was going up to people and asking them if they were famous.

One guest who saw Reiner’s erratic behaviour first hand was the comedian Bill Hader. When Reiner interrupted a conversation he was having with another guest, Hader told him he was having a private chat. In response, Reiner simply stared at him before ‘storming off’.

Rob, 78, and his 70-year-old wife Michele, meanwhile, chatted with celebrity friends including actor Larry David and comedian Sarah Silverman and left the party shortly after midnight. Jane Fonda said she’d seen the Reiners there, looking ‘healthy and happy’.

It wasn’t clear whether their son, who had moved back into a guest house in the grounds of the £10 million family home in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles a few weeks earlier, left with them.

Nick Reiner attends the LA Premiere of ‘Spinal Tap II: The End Continues’ at The Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles, California, on September 9, 2025

The Reiners pictured with their children Jake (middle), Romy and Nick (right) in 2014

The Reiners were found dead at their $13.5million six-bed Brentwood home (pictured)

He had supposedly conquered his addiction issues but insiders believe the argument at O’Brien’s party revolved around his parents’ view that he needed to get further help with his drug problem.

Nick was reportedly insistent he could get whatever treatment he needed at home and wasn’t about to do yet another stint in a rehab facility.

According to friends, Rob had become increasingly concerned that his son – who has a long history of mental illness and addiction to heroin and cocaine – was back on drugs and was ‘scared’ about what he might do next as he was becoming increasingly unstable.

Just hours later, on Sunday afternoon, Mr and Mrs Reiner were found in their home with their throats slit. Sources told the Daily Mail the couple had been in bed at the time so may have been murdered as they slept.

On Tuesday night, LA County district attorney Nathan Hochman announced Nick Reiner is to be charged with murdering his parents and faces life in prison – or possibly the death penalty.

‘These charges will be two counts of first degree murder with a special circumstance of multiple murders,’ he said. ‘He also faces a special allegation that he personally used a dangerous and deadly weapon, that being a knife.’

He added: ‘No decision at this point has been made with respect to the death penalty.’

Meanwhile, details emerged about Nick Reiner’s reported movements on the night of the killings.

Reiner checked into a hotel in the nearby seaside district of Santa Monica at around 4am on Sunday, according to celebrity news website TMZ, which quoted one witness as saying he looked ‘tweaked out’ – slang for being under the influence of drugs.

LA police have released photos of Nick Reiner being arrested 15 miles from his father Rob Reiner and mother Michele Singer Reiner’s Brentwood mansion

The Reiners were found dead at their stunning mansion in Brentwood 

Rob and Nick during an interview on May 4, 2016 in New York City

When staff entered his room later on Sunday morning, they found the shower ‘full of blood’ and more bloodstains on the bed. The bedroom window had been covered by bed sheets.

After she had found their parents’ bodies at around 3.40pm on Sunday afternoon, Nick’s sister Romy, a 28-year-old magazine writer and aspiring actress, reportedly told police that her brother ‘should be a suspect’ as he was ‘dangerous’.

After she contacted When Harry Met Sally star Billy Crystal and his wife Janice, who’d been close friends of the Reiners for years, they rushed over to their home to ‘say their goodbyes’, arriving just in time to see the bodies being taken away.

Nick Reiner was arrested at 9.15pm local time across town in LA’s Exposition Park. Photos showed officers wrestling him to the ground before handcuffing him. He was then held without bail and was reported to be on suicide watch.

Sources said Nick, his mind frazzled by days not sleeping while under the influence of the drug methamphetamine, would have violent outbursts – smashing furniture and punching walls. He was described as a ‘ticking timebomb’ that his parents wanted out of their home even as they despaired – after years of trying – of ever finding the help that would finally tame his addiction.

Meanwhile, Michelle Obama on Tuesday revealed that she and former US president Barack had had plans to meet with the Reiners on Sunday evening.

Rob had been a prominent advocate of liberal causes such as same-sex marriage and was an outspoken critic of Donald Trump.

In an apparent rebuke to President Trump, who in a grotesque display of insensitivity had blamed their murders on Rob’s ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’, Mrs Obama described them as ‘some of the most decent, courageous people you’d ever want to know’.

Nick, 32, was seen being placed in handcuffs outside a Los Angeles metro station

Nick arrives at the premiere of ‘Spinal Tap II: The End Continues’ on September 9, 2025

Rob and Nick attend AOL Build Speaker Series at AOL Studios in New York on May 4, 2016 

As a horrified Hollywood tries to digest the sudden and brutal loss of one of its most admired and affable filmmakers, many will inevitably be pondering what exactly provided the spark for his and Michele’s murder.

Friends have said that Rob had urged his son to join them at the O’Brien party so they could keep an eye on him. But, as his persistent and inappropriate quizzing of fellow guests about their fame proved, it was clearly the wrong environment for a troubled man who has repeatedly made clear how much he hates the celebrity world in which he was raised.

In photos of the family at film premieres, Nick Reiner was the one who never smiled.

One of three offspring of Rob’s second marriage (he had an adopted daughter, Tracy, from his first marriage to the late actress Penny Marshall, as well as another son, Jake, and daughter, Romy, with Michele), Nick Reiner has admitted to having long been deeply uncomfortable about being the child of one of Hollywood’s most acclaimed and beloved film directors. He heartily agreed with an interviewer who talked about wanting to ‘burn off’ his privilege and spoke of the ‘dark years’ engulfed in heroin and cocaine addiction, sometimes living on the streets.

He claimed it was there – and in the myriad rehab clinics his parents sent him to – that he found real companionship.

Nick Reiner certainly wouldn’t be the first child of the Hollywood elite to be crushed by the weight of the challenge of having to match the success of their parents or be corrupted by their cosseting, but – if the accusations against him are proved – few have come off the rails quite as drastically and tragically.

He was born into Hollywood ‘royalty’: in his 1980s and 1990s heyday, his father acted in films such as Bullets Over Broadway and Sleepless In Seattle, as well as directing the likes of Stand By Me and Misery.

Rob’s father, Carl Reiner, was an award-winning comic actor while his mother, Estelle Lebost, was a singer who delivered the memorable ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ line in the delicatessen scene of her son’s 1989 hit film When Harry Met Sally.

Rob Reiner defends son Nick as he’s questioned about his struggles

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Rob and Michele set up the I Am Your Child Foundation, a national early-child development initiative in 1997, followed in 2004 by Parents’ Action For Children, a charity with a similar emphasis on parental education.

They would later admit that, as they campaigned for better support for other children, they were failing to understand the depth of their own son’s problems.

Others, however, claimed on Tuesday that Nick was a self-pitying spoilt brat whose tantrums – which lasted well into adulthood – were over-indulged by his parents to the infuriation of his siblings. A family friend told the Daily Mail that Nick was an unpleasant presence in the house, continually smelling of cannabis and sweat, whose parents could barely persuade to say hello to visitors.

Reiner said he was sent off to his first drug rehabilitation clinic on his 15th birthday and would have at least 17 more stints in such facilities as his parents tried every treatment they could find for him.

When they didn’t work and he got to a point where he refused to return to rehab, he had to go his own way. ‘I was homeless in Maine. I was homeless in New Jersey. I was homeless in Texas,’ he said in a 2016 interview. ‘I spent nights on the street. I spent weeks on the street. It was not fun.’

He added: ‘If I wanted to do it my way and not go to the programmes they were suggesting, then I had to be homeless.’

Reiner once told People magazine: ‘That made me who I am now, having to deal with that stuff. I met crazy great people there, so out of my element.

‘Now, I’ve been home for a really long time and I’ve sort of gotten acclimated [sic] back to being in LA and being around my family. But there was a lot of dark years there.’

He gave the interview to publicise a semi-autobiographical independent film, Being Charlie, that he made with his father, which was clearly inspired by his addiction and the strain it put on their relationship.

The film – which Rob directed and Nick co-wrote – is about Charlie, a young drug addict who has been in and out of rehab, and who has a famous actor father embarrassed by his behaviour.

Charlie resents what he sees as the harsh way his parents are treating his addiction, but it ends with father and son reconciling.

Rob, who admitted he and Michele ‘wouldn’t listen’ when their son told them rehab wasn’t working for him, said making the film made him better equipped to understand Nick and ultimately become a ‘better father’.

Kevin Cheatham (pictured), 34, told the Daily Mail that Nick looked calm throughout the dramatic arrest

Nick admitted he ‘didn’t bond’ well with his father when he was younger and said that working on Being Charlie ‘made me feel closer to him’.

In 2016, Nick told David Manheim, the host of a podcast series about addiction, that he’d turned to drugs in part to deal with his family’s fame.

When Manheim said he started taking drugs to ‘burn off my privilege’, Reiner told him: ‘It’s so interesting you brought that up because that’s what was my [experience].

‘I never wanted to identify with my father, with money or being judged on any of that stuff. it makes me uncomfortable.’

And when Manheim said how much he admired Rob’s films, Nick added: ‘It’s a paradox. You’re seeing how they made everyone [happy] and then I’m the one that makes everyone unhappy.’ He added sarcastically: ‘The question I love to hear is: ‘You come from a background like this, how could you ever get into drugs?’ It’s like, well gee, I don’t even know where to start.’

Rob said he was sympathetic towards his son’s struggle with his fame, having gone through it himself with his own father, although he conceded he never turned to drugs.

Nick insisted he didn’t mind revealing so much about himself but what hurt was being accused of being a ‘spoilt, white rich kid’.

Others, however, insisted that he was exactly that.

Erik Aude, a stuntman on Being Charlie, told The New York Post that father and son had at least one vicious argument while making their film and that the latter was a ‘nepo-baby, a spoiled kid to the tee’.

He said that, as far as the son was concerned, his father – who was providing his services and contacts to his son’s film for free – ‘can’t do anything right’.

Nick admitted he once suffered a heart attack on a plane because of his cocaine use and woke up in a hospital. On another occasion, he threw a rock through the window of a rehab centre to convince officials he needed medication.

Reiner claimed in 2016 that he’d managed to stop taking heroin after ‘realising’ that ‘I come from a nice family. I’m not supposed to be out there on the streets and in homeless shelters doing all these… things’. He added: ‘I was so lost – I didn’t know anything about myself or the world.’

He soon relapsed, however. In 2018, he admitted on the same addiction podcast that he’d smashed up his parents’ guest house the previous year while high on cocaine and methamphetamine. ‘I started punching out different things in my guest house… started with the TV and then I went over to the lamp… everything in the guest house got wrecked,’ he said.

He explained that he’d spun into an uncontrollable rage when his parents told him he ‘had to go’.

A few months ago, witnesses said Nick started screaming at his father inside a smart Santa Monica restaurant, Giorgio Baldi.

It appears that while the film they made together had a happy ending, father and son never managed to resolve their differences in real life.