Inside Rob Reiner and Billy Crystal’s Five-Decade ‘Bromance’

Billy Crystal and the late Rob Reiner were the closest of friends and colleagues. 

Reiner died on Sunday, Dec. 14, at age 78. The This Is Spinal Tap director-star and his wife Michele Singer Reiner were found dead in their home in Los Angeles’ Brentwood neighborhood. Police later identified their son Nick Reiner as the suspect. Nick has been arrested and is being charged with murder. 

Crystal, 77, and their friend Larry David were seen at the Reiner family’s house on Sunday. Crystal “looked like he was about to cry,” a neighbor told ABC 7 Los Angeles. The New York Post reported that the Analyze This star was joined by his wife, producer Janice Crystal.

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Reiner and Crystal’s bond stretches back to 1976, years before their most famous collaboration: the 1989 Nora Ephron-written rom-com When Harry Met Sally. As director, Reiner initially resisted casting Crystal and Meg Ryan in the title roles on the basis of friendship, he told PEOPLE in 2019. 

“Whenever you do something this personal and you’re best friends, if it doesn’t work, it’s like, ‘Oy!’ ” he recalled. “Finally, I said, ‘Aw, f— it; he’s perfect!’ The biggest laugh in any film I’ve ever done was a line Billy came up with: ‘I’ll have what she’s having.’ ” (Ryan, he added, “was the one who said, ‘I’ll do it in some incongruous place, like a restaurant.’”)

On The Howard Stern Show in 2016, Reiner revealed he had considered plenty of other A-listers for the part of Harry before deciding Crystal was “the best one,” as the filmmaker said. “I had gone to Albert Brooks, I had gone to Tom Hanks, I had talked to Michael Keaton and Richard Dreyfuss… not only did [Crystal] nail it, but he contributed like crazy.” 

Crystal featured in smaller roles in Reiner’s 1984 feature directorial debut This Is Spinal Tap and his 1987 fantasy film The Princess Bride. The pair first met and hit it off in 1975 when Crystal was cast as Reiner’s onscreen pal in Norman Lear’s CBS sitcom All in the Family.

“I hadn’t met Rob before, and here we were cast as best friends,” Crystal recalled in a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter titled “Billy Crystal: How Rob Reiner and I Built a Bromance of Four Decades.” “What impressed me the most about Rob was, one, he was so genial, but two, he was so smart… It’s a very impressive combination of talents that I first met — plus, he was just hilarious.”

Their onscreen bromance “worked really well,” added Crystal, “and we said, ‘It feels right onstage, why don’t we just continue this in our lives?’ We became the closest of friends.”

The Monsters Inc. star also had praise for the Emmy-winning director’s father, Carl Reiner, who died in 2020 at age 98.

“He was an uncle to me, and Mel [Brooks] has been the same way,” Crystal said during a virtual appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2021. “That’s one of the great blessings. Rob is my dearest friend and then Carl and I had a whole separate, wonderful relationship where we would speak… He was just a giant.”

Crystal supported Reiner as recently as the premiere of Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, the filmmaker’s 41-year-later sequel to the original mockumentary. In July, Crystal made an appearance at a San Diego Comic-Con panel featuring Reiner in conversation with Paul Feig.

“Paul, please ask Rob what it’s like directing friends?” quipped the actor in a video message. Reiner, praising Crystal’s When Harry Met Sally performance again, sweetly summed up their work together: “I got lucky.”