Richard Riehle, a prolific character actor best known for memorable turns in Office Space, Bridesmaids, Glory, and Casino has died, Variety reports. He was 78. A cause of death was not immediately available.
Riehle worked extensively across film and television, amassing over 400 credits during his career, according to IMDB (with the database noting he has 10 additional upcoming projects). Though he scored his first screen roles in the Seventies, Riehle spent the early part of his career doing regional theater around the U.S., and especially in the Pacific Northwest.
It wasn’t until the late 1980s that his onscreen career picked up, especially after he was cast in the celebrated 1989 Civil War drama, Glory. Another important part was in the 1992 crime thriller, The Public Eye, where Riehle met Joe Pesci, who helped him get a role in Martin Scorsese’s 1995 classic, Casino.
During the Nineties, Riehle popped up in movies like The Fugitive, and TV shows like Quantum Leap, Murder, She Wrote, and L.A. Law. In 1992, he appeared on an episode Star Trek: The Next Generation; over the coming decades, would work on other franchise shows like, Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise.
One of Riehle’s most enduring performances was in the 1999 comedy Office Space, as Tom Smykowski, a product manager with a dubious job as a conduit between customers and engineers who tries to stave off a firing by proclaiming in one scene, “I have people skills!” Another classic scene found Tom explaining his supposed million-dollar-idea, the “Jump to Conclusions” mat — a literal mat with different conclusions written on it “that you could jump to” — to his unimpressed colleagues.
“[I]t was just an amazing group of people,” Riehle told The AV Club of working on Office Space, though he did note that the “Jump to Conclusions Mat” had apparently disappeared. “And that’s including [director] Mike Judge! I saw him when he brought me in for Extract, and it was very nice. 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 continued to work extensively over the next couple decades, appearing in shows like The West Wing, ER, Psych, and Drunk History; he also had an extensive recurring role on the sitcom, Grounded for Life. Meanwhile, Riehle’s film credits included Transformers: Age of Extinction, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, and Bridesmaids.
