By Chelsea Bailey, Karina Tsui, CNN
(CNN) — When Nick Reiner was photographed alongside his family at the Los Angeles premiere of his father’s comedy musical, “Spinal Tap II,” in September, he wasn’t smiling.
Instead, the son of legendary Hollywood director Rob Reiner and producer Michele Singer Reiner stood impassively for the family portrait alongside his siblings.
Three months later, Nick Reiner, 32, has been arrested and jailed on suspicion of murder after his parents were found dead inside their home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles Sunday. He’s being held on a $4 million bond.
Reiner has previously been open about his struggles with drug addiction, including homelessness and stints in rehab. He co-wrote the 2015 film “Being Charlie,” a movie inspired by those experiences and directed by his father.
“That made me who I am now, having to deal with that stuff,” he told People magazine in 2016.
‘Being Charlie’
During the promotional tour for his film, “Being Charlie,” Nick Reiner often appeared alongside his father to discuss how he used his own experiences to inform the film.
When they appeared in AOL’s speaker series “Build,” Nick Reiner shared there were “a lot of dark years” as he fought through addiction.
He said he learned to use comedy as a way of coping with some of his experiences in rehab, and later, he channeled it into the film.
Rehab is “tragic and all but the people that are there are not going to want you to throw them a pity party. They’re going to want you to laugh at the situation and make light of it,” he said.
During the same interview, Rob Reiner called the project “the most personal thing I’ve ever done” and talked about working with his son.
“You don’t set out to have a cathartic experience or be therapeutic in some way,” the elder Reiner said. “The fact that we were dealing with things that Nick had gone through and how I had related to it and how his mother had related to it…it forced me to have to see more clearly and understand more deeply what Nick had gone through and I think it forced him to see things that I had experienced during this process.”
The Los Angeles Police Department has declined to share additional details about the investigation into Reiner and Singer Reiner’s death. The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office has not filed any criminal charges in connection with the case.
“We owe it to their memory to pursue justice and accountability for the lives that were tragically taken,” the district attorney’s office said in a statement.
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CNN’s Lisa Respers France contributed to this report.
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