Conan O’Brien is speaking out about the deaths of his friends Rob Reiner and Michele Reiner in December 2025.
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Hours before the beloved director and sitcom actor, 78, and his photographer-producer wife, Michele, 70, were found dead in their Los Angeles home on December 14, all three Reiners attended O’Brien’s December 13 holiday party. Their son Nick was later arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
In a new interview with The New Yorker, O’Brien, 62, reflected on his friendship with the couple. “I knew Rob and Michele, and then increasingly got closer and closer to them,” he said, adding that he and his wife, Liza Powel O’Brien, “were seeing them a lot.”
“They were just such lovely people,” he added of Rob and Michele. “And to have that experience of saying good night 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 afterward. I mean, there’s no other word for it.”
Rob and his son reportedly argued at O’Brien’s party. Nick, 32, was also “freaking everyone out, acting crazy, kept asking people if they were famous,” one insider told PEOPLE.
“It’s just so awful,” O’Brien continued in the new interview. “And 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. To have that voice go quiet in an instant is still hard for me to comprehend.”
Conan O’Brien Reflects on Rob Reiner’s Prolific Career: ‘He Influenced My Generation Enormously’
O’Brien also praised Rob Reiner’s work as a director. The late-night host and podcaster pointed out that it is “an almost impossible feat” to make seven movies in around ten years “that are classics… With Spinal Tap alone, if that’d been the only thing he ever did, he influenced my generation enormously. Spinal Tap—when it came out, I was in college, and it was like a splitting-the-atom moment.”
Speaking about other legends in the industry, O’Brien also reflected on the profound loss of Catherine O’Hara, who passed away at 71 on Jan. 30. “Another person I’d put in that category,” he said. “That’s someone who was perfection.”
O’Brien is set to host the 98th annual Academy Awards again on March 15.