Kevin McCarthy

McCarthy trained at the University of Minnesota and built a substantial Broadway career, earning a Tony nomination, before moving into film in the early 1950s with a string of dramatic roles.

He spends the film's unforgettable final stretch running into traffic screaming 'They're here already! You're next!' — a moment so iconic it's been quoted and parodied for seven decades. A respected stage actor with a Tony-nominated Broadway career, he brought genuine theatrical desperation to the sequence.

He made a cameo reprising a version of the same panicked warning decades later in the 1978 remake, a rare instance of an actor returning to acknowledge his own iconic moment in a later adaptation.