The Bear paid tribute to legendary director and actor Rob Reiner during its final episode.
In the last episode of the hit FX series, “The Original Beef of Chicagoland,” line cook Ebra (Edwin Lee Gibson) calls restaurant consultant Albert Schnurr (Reiner) to deliver good news about the eatery’s future. “Albert, we are in business,” Ebra says into his phone. “It’s perfect. I will have all the documents, email it to you immediately. Anything else I can do?”
While viewers don’t hear Albert on the other end of the call, Ebra pauses and then says, “As you wish,” quoting Cary Elwes’ Westley in the Reiner-directed 1987 classic The Princess Bride.
Before his tragic death, Reiner appeared as Schnurr in a three-episode arc during Season Four of The Bear.
In December 2025, new broke that Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer, were found dead in their California home. Their son Nick, was charged with first-degree murder for allegedly stabbing the filmmaker and his wife to death.
Their deaths shocked the entertainment world as friends, fans, and colleagues of the Reiners in Hollywood and beyond mourned the heartbreaking loss. Martin Scorsese, a longtime friend of the couple, penned a moving essay for The New York Times published on Christmas Day. “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.”
Toward the end of the tribute, the director wrote, “The only thing that will help me to accept it is the passing of time. So, like all of their loved ones and their friends — and these were people with many, many friends — I have to be allowed to imagine them alive and well … and that one day, I’ll be at a dinner or a party and find myself seated next to Rob, and I’ll hear his laugh and see his beatific face and laugh at his stories and relish his natural comic timing, and feel lucky all over again to have him as a friend.”
