Carl Reiner has accumulated lots of plaudits over his seven decades in the entertainment industry as a writer, producer, director and actor. But alongside his work on the seminal television series “Your Show of Shows” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and his directing on films that include “The Jerk” and “All of Me,” Reiner can now claim another designation: At 96, he’s the oldest person ever nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award.
Reiner’s goal, in a way, is to always have goals: He wakes up every day and starts writing, churning out a string of books over the past few years. And now he’s the narrator of the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary “If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast,” which chronicles the lives of a number of vibrant people in their 90s, including Reiner.
The category of Outstanding Narrator also includes 71-year-old Charles Dance, 81-year-old Morgan Freeman and 93-year-old Sir David Attenborough, making it likely to be the oldest Emmy category ever. (Liev Schreiber, a youngster at 50, drags the average down to 78.)
And while Reiner is proud of that designation, he’d also like to point out something else: “I think I may be the oldest tweeter,” he said in an interview with TheWrap at his Beverly Hills home. In fact, he’s on Twitter several times a day, rivaling his son Rob Reiner in his outspoken anti-Donald Trump views.
“If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast” is titled after a favorite saying of Reiner’s – though he admits that there was a morning when he was in the obit, and he still ate breakfast.
“Before breakfast every morning I read the obit page,” he said. “If I’m not in it, I eat breakfast. But one morning I picked it up, and there I am, in the obits. It was a picture of me and Polly Bergen, who had died.”
“I don’t know why they couldn’t find a picture of her with somebody more famous than me,” Reiner added.
If Reiner wins the Emmy, it will come 51 years after he won his first as Best Supporting Actor for “Caesar’s Hour” in 1957.