He also played the television reporter, Dick Thornburg,
in the Die Hard movies. Truly a loathsome character.
That actor seems to have built his career on playing disliked, unrelenting, anal retentive, bureaucratic jerks.
Here’s a measure of how good he is at it. In the movie “Real Genius”, the audience is beckoned to dislike Kent, the competing student who sabotages the protagonist’s experiment. But even as despicable as he was, he ends up having an ersatz experience with the Son of God, and it is the professor played by Atherton whom we all gratifyingly watched have his house fill up with popcorn (and he was allergic to popcorn). Yup. Atherton plays a real good “bad guy”.