Martin Scorsese honours Rob and Michele Reiner in emotional essay

In a Christmas Day essay, legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese opened up about the profound grief he feels following the deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner. “Rob Reiner was my friend, and so was Michele,” Scorsese wrote.

“From now on, I’ll have to use the past tense, and that fills me with such profound sadness. But there’s no other choice.” He described the tragedy in stark terms, calling it “an obscenity, an abyss in lived reality,” words that capture the shock and disbelief surrounding their loss.

Scorsese traced his friendship with Rob Reiner back to the early 1970s, when both men were finding their footing in Los Angeles. From the start, the connection was immediate. “Right away, I loved hanging out with Rob. We had a natural affinity for each other,” he wrote, describing Reiner as hilarious, sharp, and generous without ever dominating a room. One of Scorsese’s most vivid memories was Reiner’s joy for life, recalling that he “had a beautiful sense of uninhibited freedom, fully enjoying the life of the moment, and he had a great barreling laugh.”

The essay also pays tribute to Reiner’s lasting impact on cinema. Scorsese praised Misery as “a very special film, beautifully acted by Kathy Bates and James Caan,” and called This Is Spinal Tap “in a class of its own,” singling it out as a rare and immaculate comic creation.

Their friendship eventually led to collaboration, with Reiner appearing in The Wolf of Wall Street as the father of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character. Scorsese wrote that Reiner “could improvise with the best” and brought deep emotional understanding to his role, balancing pride, love, and an unspoken sense of tragedy.

Revisiting that performance now is especially painful. “I was moved by the delicacy and openness of his performance when we shot it,” Scorsese wrote.

“Now, it breaks my heart to even think of the tenderness of Rob’s performance in this and other scenes.” The essay repeatedly returns to the idea that Reiner’s warmth and humanity were as important as his artistic achievements.

Scorsese closed with a poignant expression of longing, imagining a future moment when memory briefly feels like presence.

He wrote of hoping that one day he might again find himself seated next to Rob at a dinner or party, hearing his laugh, enjoying his stories, and “feeling lucky all over again to have him as a friend.”