McKean Honors Reiner After 57 Years of Friendship and Film

Michael McKean has paid tribute to director Rob Reiner, who died this week, recalling a bond that stretched from a 1969 first meeting all the way through the making of a rock mockumentary that became a cultural landmark.

Rob Reiner died this week, prompting tributes from collaborators and friends across the industry.
Michael McKean, who starred in 1984's This Is Spinal Tap, said he first met Reiner in 1969.
The two men maintained a friendship spanning 57 years before Reiner's death.
McKean's tribute was reported by Page Six on May 30, 2026.
This Is Spinal Tap is widely credited with establishing the rock mockumentary as a genre.

It was a friendship that outlasted eight-track tapes, two Hollywood strikes, and about a dozen shifts in what the word “comedy” means in America. Michael McKean this week remembered director Rob Reiner, who has died, as a man he had known since 1969 — more than half a century before either of them would have guessed the phrase “These go to eleven” would still be in circulation.

McKean, who played ill-fated lead guitarist David St. Hubbins in Reiner’s 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, offered a tribute following Reiner’s death, according to Page Six. The film, shot in a loose, fly-on-the-wall style that influenced virtually every comedy ensemble that came after it, remains one of the more durable artefacts of that decade — the kind of picture that younger viewers discover on streaming and immediately want to quote at someone.

The working relationship between McKean and Reiner was, by the time cameras rolled on Tap, already fifteen years old. They had met in 1969, when both were considerably earlier in careers that would eventually earn them the kind of cultural real estate most people in the industry spend entire lifetimes chasing.

Reiner went on to direct The Princess Bride, Stand by Me, and When Harry Met Sally in a run during the 1980s and early 1990s that holds up as well as anything that era produced. McKean’s tribute, warm and specific in the way that 57-year friendships tend to make things, lands as one of the more personal notes in a week of industry remembrances.