There's long been an online rumor that Dana Carvey observed a moment for the 9/11 attacks while wearing a turtle costume on "The Master of Disguise."
Paul Morigi/Getty Images; Happy Madison Productions
Two decades after the fact, Dana Carvey confirmed that he did, in fact, observe a moment of silence for victims of the 9/11 attacks on the set of "The Master of Disguise" while partially dressed in his "Turtle Man" costume.
Carvey wears a variety of increasingly ridiculous disguises as the star of the 2002 film, in which he plays the heir to a disguise-master dynasty. The most iconic of them is his "Turtle Man" costume, which involved a bulbous green suit, bald cap, and turtle-esque facial prosthetics.
It was in a variation of this get-up that Carvey observed a moment of silence for the September 11, 2001, attacks, the actor confirmed on Wednesday's episode of his "Fly on the Wall" podcast with David Spade.
"After 9/11, I was shooting a movie called 'The Master of Disguise,'" Carvey said on the podcast. "After 9/11 we took an appropriate time off and went back to shooting, and I was playing — if you've seen the movie, kids — the Turtle Man, with a bald cap and a weird thing on my lip and a big, green shell outfit."
The original rumor, which surfaced as a piece of trivia on the film's IMDb page, asserted that Carvey and the crew learned about the 9/11 attacks while filming the "Turtle Club" scene, Defector reported in 2021. That isn't quite true: Director Perry Andelin Blake told Defector that the attacks occurred during pre-production, and the moment of silence took place during the first day of filming — "Turtle Club" day.
Carvey said that he was already in his "Turtle Man" prosthetics by the time they observed the moment of silence, and while he "might've gotten the shell off," it would have taken too long to remove the prosthetics.
"I'm holding hands, and I'm lowering my head and praying, and I just thought at the moment, 'This is really strange,'" Carvey said.
