Martin Scorsese paid tribute to his longtime friend Rob Reiner in a moving essay for The New York Times published on Christmas Day. “Rob reiner was my friend, and so was Michele,” the legendary director wrote, including Reiner’s late wife in his thoughts. “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.”
Scorsese recalls crossing paths with Reiner for the first time in the Los Angeles comedy scene of the early 1970s, when both were just starting out. “Right away, I loved hanging out with Rob,” he wrote. “We had a natural affinity for each other. He was hilarious and sometimes bitingly funny, but he was never the kind of guy who would take over the room.”
Decades later, Scorsese cast Reiner in a key supporting role in 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street, playing the father of reckless money man Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio). “He could improvise with the best, he was a master at comedy, he worked beautifully with Leo and the rest of the guys, and he understood the human predicament of his character: The man loved his son, he was happy with his success, but he knew that he was destined for a fall,” scorsese wrote.
He particularly noted Reiner’s fine acting in a pivotal scene where DiCaprio’s character considers walking away from his swashbuckling life of high-finance fraud. “The look on Rob’s face, as he realizes that Leo is hesitating and that he ultimately won’t stop, is so eloquent,” Scorsese wrote. “‘You got all the money in the world,’ he says. ‘You need everybody else’s money?’ A loving father, mystified by his son. I was moved by the delicacy and openness of his performance when we shot it, moved onc again as we brought the scene together in the editing room.”