Character actor Richard Riehle, the face behind Office Space’s anxious office drone Tom Smykowski, has died at 78 after a nearly 50-year career and more than 400 screen credits.

Yahoo Entertainment reported that Riehle died of natural causes in Los Angeles on Oct. 15, with Variety and TMZ also covering the news.

He was the kind of working actor audiences recognize instantly even when they cannot place the name. Hollywood runs on people like that.

Riehle built a nearly 50-year career on steady, specific work rather than stardom. He piled up more than 400 acting credits and kept booking jobs into the 2020s, earning dozens of roles in the last decade alone.

His best-known turn came in 1999’s Office Space as Tom Smykowski, the nervous office worker whose flair for catastrophe helped define that cult comedy. He also turned up in Casino, The Fugitive, and Of Mice and Men, the kind of solid supporting work that fills out real movies.

Farm-town roots and a craftsman’s résumé

Riehle was raised in a small farming town in Wisconsin. He discovered acting while studying at the University of Notre Dame, then earned a master’s degree at the University of Minnesota before chasing the work full time.

His first film credit came in 1975’s Rooster Cogburn opposite John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn. From there he became a reliable presence across film and television, a quartermaster in Glory, a reverend in Fried Green Tomatoes, a detective on The Golden Girls, and an interstellar diplomat on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

That same blue-collar screen presence has marked other recent losses in entertainment, including Vincent Pastore’s death at 80, another character actor whose face carried whole scenes.

Riehle never pretended the early work was glamorous. Looking back on one early appearance, he told the AV Club in 2017 he barely registered on screen.

“I was a glorified extra. I think I was a dead body two or three different places in there. But I can’t find myself in it, so I wouldn’t expect anybody else to recognize me, either!”

The point was simple. He kept showing up anyway.

He kept saying yes

Late in life he still treated the job as a craft, not a brand. In a 2021 interview with YouTuber Brian Allan, Riehle described a working rule that explains a résumé that long.

“My choice is almost always to say ‘yes.’ I can almost always find something worthwhile in every project that’s presented to me.”

That attitude carried him through lean seasons and busy ones. In an early 2025 interview with Pop Culture Addicts, he sounded almost amused that the work never stopped coming.

“I was doing this stuff that was totally unexpected, and I thought, well this is crazy, but I’ll keep doing it until somebody tells me, ‘OK, move on. You don’t belong here.’... So far, I haven’t gotten that notice.”

Readers who follow entertainment farewells have seen the same pattern with other craftsmen, from actors to musicians such as steel guitar legend Tommy Detamore, gone too soon at 70.

Yahoo said it reached out to Riehle’s representatives for comment. A response was not included in the report.

Friends remember the man behind the credits

Los Angeles-based artist Jay Spears, a friend of Riehle’s, wrote on Facebook about the man he knew off camera. Spears put the emphasis where Riehle’s colleagues would recognize it, talent paired with character.

“Everyone who knew him was aware that his fantastic talent was only exceeded by his generosity with it. In the decades I knew him, never once did an unkind, unpleasant, or unfair utterance pass his cheerful lips. His stellar career guarantees his immortality for as long as digital media exists.”

He was photographed as recently as Nov. 30, 2024. The image, credited to Jason Davis for Getty Images for Hallmark Media, showed a working actor still in the mix near the end of a long run.

Sudden goodbyes in public life land hard for families and fans alike, whether the story is a veteran performer’s final curtain or other painful headlines such as the Lowe family’s loss of 13-year-old Fiona.

Riehle’s career was never about the red carpet. It was about the next call time, the next small part done right, and a Wisconsin work ethic that outlasted fashion in a business that forgets names fast.

Hollywood still needs the grown-ups who take the work seriously, treat people decently, and leave the set better than they found it. Riehle did that for almost fifty years.