In April 2023, Dana Carvey addressed a minor controversy surrounding himself on his Fly on the Wall podcast with David Spade. As it turns out, a rumor had been going around for years that Carvey first got word of the September 11th attacks while filming a scene from his 2002 comedy The Master of Disguise.
The sequence featured Carvey dressed as the “Turtle Man,” complete with a bald cap, prosthetics, and a large shell-like suit. According to the legend, Carvey was then forced to observe a moment of silence in costume.
On the podcast, Spade asked Carvey to clarify whether he was actively shooting on 9/11 and whether he was wearing the turtle outfit when everything went down. “What happened was they obfuscated it,” Carvey explained, after pointing out that the cast and crew had taken some time off following the attacks.
The day they resumed shooting, Carvey was told there was gonna be a group prayer in honor of the victims. “I would’ve held everyone up for a half hour getting all that prosthetic makeup [off], so, as I remember it…everyone else was in civilian clothes, I’m dressed as the Turtle Man with a bald head, and I’m holding hands and I’m lowering my head and praying, and I just thought at the moment, ‘This is really strange.’”
Dana Carvey Really Did Have a 9/11 Prayer While Dressed as the Turtle Man
“It’s very ridiculous,” Spade said in response, adding that somebody even thinking to repeat a “dumb story” like that was pretty odd (we at VICE agree with him wholeheartedly). Spade then pressed Carvey on what he did with the shell portion of the outfit during the prayer session. “They might’ve gotten the shell off, but they didn’t get the turtle head or the turtle lip off,” Carvey revealed. As he tells it, under the circumstances, “They just couldn’t get it all off.”
The film’s director, Perry Andelin Blake, discussed the rumor a couple of years earlier, telling Defector that he was actually supposed to be doing tech scouting on the morning of 9/11. Production began roughly two weeks later, when they shot the Turtle Club scene. “I felt it was a little weird to be making this funny, silly kids’ movie in the wake of this huge national tragedy,” Blake recalled. So he decided to hold a moment of silence while his lead actor wore the most ridiculous costume imaginable.
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