Rob Reiner Left a Remarkable Pop Culture Legacy. His Work as an Activist Was Just as Impressive.

The director of beloved films including 'The Princess Bride' and 'When Harry Met Sally' also championed causes like marriage equality

Between 1984 and 1992, Rob Reiner directed seven nearly perfect films, each of which was completely different from the one that preceded it.

Arguably no American filmmaker has had a run of hits as impressive as Reiner did, between the release of his directorial debut, the influential mockumentary This is Spinal Tap and the riveting legal thriller A Few Good Men eight years later.

Along the way, Reiner made the underrated teen comedy The Sure Thing (1985); Stand by Me (1986), a bittersweet coming-of-age tale that proved he could also do drama; The Princess Bride (1987) a witty, genre-bending fantasy-romance; When Harry Met Sally (1989), quite possibly the greatest romantic comedy of the last half-century; and Misery, a psychological horror film that earned Kathy Bates an Oscar.

This unmatched winning streak yielded some of the most-frequently quoted lines of dialogue in all of popular culture:

“You can’t handle the truth.”

“These go to eleven.”

“My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

“I’ll have what she’s having.”

Especially for those of us who grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Reiner was a touchstone, the guy behind movies that we didn’t merely like, but actually loved, committed to memory, and watched over and over until the VHS wore out.

Reiner was also uncommonly versatile, moving with ease between genres, mediums, and creative disciplines. He somehow never won an Academy Award himself—and was never even nominated as a director—but specialized in the kind of grown-up but broadly appealing storytelling that basically no longer exists in contemporary American cinema.

All of which magnifies the profound loss of his death over the weekend.

The seventy-eight-year-old was found dead on Sunday along with his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, in an apparent homicide. Their thirty-two-year-old son, Nick, whose struggles with addiction and mental illness and inspired Reiner’s 2015 film Being Charlie, has been arrested in connection with the crime. Their deaths capped off a truly wretched holiday weekend marred by violence around the world, from an attack on a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney to a mass shooting at Brown University.

Reiner’s death marks an incongruously tragic end for an artist who exuded warmth and whose work, even at its darkest, seemed to reflect a belief in essential human decency. It also fundamentally reshapes the image of what seemed to be an unusually happy and closeknit Hollywood family. The son of comedy legend Carl Reiner and actress Estelle Reiner, Rob Reiner was born into showbiz royalty, and grew up in the company of titans like Mel Brooks and Dick Van Dyke.

Yet he became a household name in his own right, first by starring in Norman Lear’s All in the Family, one of the most influential sitcoms in TV history, then by striking out as a filmmaker. Their warm father-son bond was captured in 2020, when they sweetly re-enacted a scene from The Princess Bride a few days before the elder Reiner passed away.

Reiner, whose final film, a long-awaited sequel to Spinal Tap, was released just three months ago, leaves behind a remarkable pop culture legacy. Yet it may ultimately pale in comparison to his enduring contributions as a political activist.

On All in the Family, Reiner played Michael “Meathead’ Stivic, a liberal who frequently clashed with his bigoted father-in-law Archie Bunker—a dynamic that was familiar to millions of families during the political and cultural turbulence of the early ‘70s. Unlike many other sitcom actors of the era, Reiner was able to successfully move on from the role that made him famous. Yet in another sense, “Meathead” stayed with him forever: to the very end, Reiner remained a champion of progressive values, who was always willing to stand up to the Archie Bunkers of the world, even if it meant getting skewered as a liberal scold. (Or posthumously mocked in a despicable post by the president.)

Reiner also followed the example set by Lear, the prolific writer-producer known for sitcoms that were both funny and socially conscious. I spoke to Reiner after Lear’s death almost exactly two years ago, and he was kind and generous with his time even though he was in the car on the way to the taping of a birthday special for Dick Van Dyke. He described Lear as a second father. “I couldn’t be closer to a male role model in my life,” he said at the time.

Reiner recalled how Lear provided financial backing for his first four films—even stepping in with the money for Stand By Me when Columbia Pictures backed out days before production was set to begin. “If it wasn’t for him, I would never have gotten to make Spinal Tap, because he had faith I could do it.”

Reiner expressed admiration for how Lear used entertaining stories to grapple with heavy issues. In one of his favorite episodes of All in the Family, Season 1’s “Judging Books by Covers,” Archie wrongly suspects that Michael’s friend (played by Anthony Geary, who also died this week) is gay, then finds out that his old football buddy actually is.

“It’s using your platform to get ideas across, and to try to do it in an entertaining way that keeps the audience engaged. [Lear] was great at that,” said Reiner, who adopted this approach in films like Ghosts of Mississippi, about the trial of Byron De La Beckwith, the white supremacist who assassinated Medgar Evers, and The American President, a Capra-esque romance about a commander-in-chief who falls for an environmental lobbyist.

Lear also inspired him to take action politically, using his fame, money, and connections to advance causes he cared about, from early childhood education to marriage equality.

“When he started People for the American Way, I saw you can use your celebrity to try to affect change, so that got me into doing that kind of thing,” Reiner told me.

In the late ‘90s, Reiner spearheaded the campaign for Proposition 10, which used a tax on tobacco to fund early childhood education. A decade later, he co-founded the American Foundation for Equal Rights, an organization that almost singlehandedly managed to overturn California’s gay marriage ban by pursuing a legal strategy that was deemed too risky by other civil liberties groups.

Though he continued making films, Reiner became so well-known for his activism that he received the South Park treatment. A 2003 episode of the series called “Butt Out” lampooned him as a morbidly obese hypocrite determined to inflict his will on others. “I thought it was funny,” Reiner said when asked about the episode in a Reddit AMA in 2017, “but I’m not quite that fat.”

Over the last decade, Reiner has been a persistent Trump critic, launching a committee to investigate the president’s ties to Russia and developing a series about his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Last year, he produced a documentary called God & Country, which chronicled the rise of Christian nationalism (and opened with footage of the Jan. 6 attacks.)

While others in Hollywood grew suddenly quiet following Trump’s return to office this year, Reiner never backed down. In a September interview on CNN, he denounced Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension and the administration’s increasingly authoritarian tactics. “Control the media, control the message. Make sure that only what we have to say and only what we believe will get out to the public,” he said, predicting that he too could be silenced. “This may be the last time you ever see me.”

For Reiner, it all went back to Lear, who flew dozens of bombing missions over Nazi Germany during World War II, and continued to fight for freedom through his art and activism. Reiner was determined to carry that mantle.

“Here we are, less than 80 years after he defeated fascism, we see fascism creeping back into society. I had many conversations with him in the last year or so. And he said, ‘I can’t believe this country’s become a country I don’t recognize anymore.’ We have to honor him by continuing to fight.”

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian