The character actor died of natural causes in Los Angeles on October 15, according to Variety.
Character actor Richard Riehle, best known as the laid-off Initech product manager Tom Smykowski in Office Space, has died. He was 78. Variety confirmed that he died of natural causes on October 15 in Los Angeles. TMZ was first to report the news, according to TheWrap.
His reps confirmed the death in a statement to Deadline. It said his career "in theater, film, and television spanned nearly five decades and more than 400 projects", and that he would be remembered for "genuine goodness, boundless kindness, and unwavering generosity", especially toward emerging actors and filmmakers.
Riehle's film work started with an extra's part in Rooster Cogburn (1975) and ran to The Cowboy Killer (2026), his most recent film credit. He was the guard who let Harrison Ford's Richard Kimble escape custody in The Fugitive (1993), a banker for mobsters in Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995) and the father of Rob Schneider's character in Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999). He also appeared in Bridesmaids (2011). Variety said he appeared in more than 400 films, television shows and other projects.
In Office Space, Mike Judge's 1999 satirical comedy, Tom survives a hit-and-run accident and uses his settlement to build the Jump to Conclusions mat, fulfilling a lifelong dream. Tom appears in a wheelchair with a medical halo around his head. Riehle recalled the scene in a 2017 A.V. Club interview: "They didn't have a special effects person there, so they hired an EMT to come and put me in all of that."
Asked whether he got to keep the mat, Riehle said:
"No one knows where it is … and that's including Mike Judge!"
Riehle said he had asked Judge about it when Judge brought him in for the 2009 film Extract. Judge's reply was "It disappeared."
Riehle came into the world in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, on the 12th of May, 1948, and was one of seven siblings. His mother, Mary Margaret, was a nurse, and his father died when he was 2. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1970, where he acted in plays and worked as a stage manager, then studied German abroad.
He trained at an academy of dramatic art in Rochester, Michigan, then did regional theater in the Pacific Northwest. Riehle landed a part on Broadway in 1986 in Execution of Justice, a drama examining the court case against Dan White, the man who had assassinated San Francisco mayor George Moscone, as well as city supervisor Harvey Milk, both in 1978. Back on Broadway in 1999, Riehle played the crooked former policeman Pat McGloin opposite Kevin Spacey in the revived production of The Iceman Cometh.
On television, Riehle played Walt Finnerty, the father of Donal Logue's character, on all five seasons of Grounded for Life, the 2001-05 Fox-WB sitcom. He was Principal Ed Rooney in the 1990-91 NBC adaptation of Ferris Bueller, and he made guest appearances on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Voyager and Enterprise. He also played Warden Reynolds in HBO's Barry (2023).
Logue wrote on social media: "Richard Riehle was an amazing human being."
His wife, Jane Latham, and their four children survive him.
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