Rob Reiner’s casting as Michael “Meathead” Stivic in All in the Family was the result of a journey full of setbacks, rejections, and eventual triumph. The character of Mike was a complicated one, embodying the contradictions of the Baby Boomer generation’s counterculture. As the progressive son-in-law to Archie and Edith Bunker, Mike frequently clashed with Archie’s conservative, bigoted worldview. However, Mike was also a well-educated, liberal, and often self-righteous figure, caught between his idealistic beliefs and his personal flaws. His character often struggled to confront his own biases—especially in his relationships with the women in his life—and he sometimes appeared more interested in feeling morally superior than in actually addressing the social changes he claimed to support.
Reiner’s journey to embodying this complex role didn’t come easily. He initially auditioned for the role of Mike during the show’s early development at ABC but was rejected. However, Reiner’s career took an unexpected turn with his role on Headmaster, a short-lived 1970s dramedy created by Norman Lear. In this series, Reiner played a young teacher embroiled in a scandalous affair with a student—a morally ambiguous character that turned out to be a key turning point in his career. Though Headmaster never gained significant traction and is nearly impossible to find today, Reiner’s performance as a flawed, authority-figure was enough to catch the attention of Norman Lear, who saw promise in his acting.
After two failed pilots, All in the Family was eventually picked up by CBS, and a third pilot was produced, with Reiner finally landing the role of Mike. Reiner later reflected on the casting process in an interview, noting how his earlier rejection for the role seemed to come down to a lack of maturity in his acting. However, after his work on Headmaster, Norman Lear felt he had grown as an actor and gave him another shot. This time, Reiner was cast alongside Sally Struthers as Gloria Bunker, completing the iconic couple.
In many ways, Reiner’s portrayal of Meathead would go on to define his career, despite his initial hesitation about acting. He had always been more interested in writing and directing, and his passion for those aspects of filmmaking would later take center stage in his career. But as Meathead, Reiner became the perfect embodiment of the well-intentioned but flawed liberal of his generation. His performance was a masterclass in portraying the contradictions of the character: a well-educated, self-proclaimed progressive who still wrestled with his own biases and privilege. As the show’s success grew, Reiner’s role as Mike became indelible, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else filling the shoes of the Meathead in quite the same way. In a full-circle moment, Reiner later played a very different kind of character—Jordan Belfort’s father—in The Wolf of Wall Street, subtly reflecting the changes in both his career and in the evolution of characters like Mike, who, as time passed, would likely have evolved into more cynical, disillusioned figures.
