Richard Riehle, the very busy character actor known for his bushy mustache and quirky turn as the laid-off Initech product manager Tom Smykowski in Mike Judge’s Office Space, has died. He was 78.
Riehle died Thursday of natural causes in Los Angeles, TMZ reported. THR has reached out to his reps for more information.
Riehle also portrayed the guard who allows Harrison Ford’s Richard Kimble to escape custody in Andrew Davis’ The Fugitive (1993), a racist quartermaster in Edward Zwick’s Glory (1989), a banker for mobsters in Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) and the father or Rob Schneider’s character in Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999).
Riehle played Walt Finnerty on all five seasons of the 2001-05 Fox-WB sitcom Grounded for Life, guest-starred on the Star Trek series The Next Generation, Voyager and Enterprise and was the go-to guy to play Santa Claus; he was the jolly guy in 2011’s A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas and in lots of other projects.
He has had more than 430 acting credits on IMDb alone.
In Office Space (1999), Tom survives a hit-and-run accident and uses his big financial settlement to build a “Jump to Conclusions” mat, fulfilling a lifelong dream.
In one memorable scene, Tom appears with a medical halo around his head while in a wheelchair. “They didn’t have a special effects person there, so they hired an EMT to come and put me in all of that. Now, he didn’t screw the halo in, thank God,’” Riehle recalled in a 2017 A.V. Club interview.
“But he put all these casts on me, and I was stuck in the wheelchair and the casts for, oh, about eight or nine hours! And he’d left the cast cutter with one of the P.A.s, who got me out of it eventually at the end of the day.”
Asked if he got to keep the mat, he said: “No one knows where it is … and that’s including Mike Judge! I saw him when he brought me in for [the 2009 film Extract …. We had a nice chat, and that’s one of the things I asked him: ‘Where’s the Jump to Conclusions mat?’ He said, ‘It disappeared.’”
Riehle was born on May 12, 1948, in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. His mother, Mary Margaret, was a nurse; his father, Herbert, who worked for the post office, died when he was 2.
He graduated in 1970 from the University of Notre Dame, where he acted in plays, built sets and served as a stage manager, then studied German abroad.
Riehle gained acting experience at the Academy of Dramatic Art at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, then did lots of regional theater in the Pacific Northwest. That got him work as an extra in Rooster Cogburn (1975), starring John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn, and his first big-screen speaking part as a bartender in Joyride (1977), starring Desi Arnaz Jr. and Melanie Griffith.
Riehle made it to Broadway in 1986 with a role in the Emily Mann drama Execution of Justice, which centered on the trial of Dan White, who assassinated San Francisco mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978.
In 1999, he returned to Broadway to star as the corrupt ex-cop Pat McGloin alongside Kevin Spacey in a revival of The Iceman Cometh, nominated for five Tony Awards.
Riehle’s film résumé included Black Rain (1989), Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Shadows and Fog (1991), Free Willy (1993), Body of Evidence (1993), Stuart Saves His Family (1995), Executive Decision (1996), Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), Mercury Rising (1998), The Fluffer (2001), Bridesmaids (2011) and The Cowboy Killer (2026).
He also portrayed Principal Ed Rooney on the 1990-91 NBC adaptation of Ferris Bueller and showed up over the years on The West Wing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Golden Girls, Boston Legal, ER, NCIS, Modern Family, L.A. Law, NCIS, The Middle, Maron and Barry.