Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it’s not often that a bizarre rumor winds up getting confirmed. One exception involves Dana Carvey. On 9/11, after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, did the legendary comic and top shelf impersonator really take part in a “moment of silence” while dressed in a ridiculous turtle costume while on the set of a movie? Yes. Yes, he did.
ITS REAL!!! pic.twitter.com/pimQNaZgn1
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“It’s kind of a sensitive topic, but after 9/11 I was shooting a movie called Master of Disguise,” Carvey said on a recent episode of Fly on the Wall, the podcast he co-hosts with fellow SNL alum David Spade. “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.”
Spade then asked if the rumor of how he recognized the tragic attacks — saying a prayer while dressed as a man-turtle, with bald cap and funny glasses — was true.
“I was in [the costume] all that day and then they said, ‘We’re going to have a group prayer about 9/11,’” Carvey recalled. “And I couldn’t get the thing — I would’ve held everyone for a half hour getting all that prosthetic makeup off — so, as I remember it, everyone else was [wearing] 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 very strange.’”
Spade then asked the obvious next question: Did he manage to at least get the giant shell attached to his back off.
“They might’ve gotten the shell off, but they didn’t get the turtle head or the turtle lip off,” Carvey remembered. “They couldn’t get it all off.”
Tragedy and comedy are often intertwined, but rarely in such a bizarre fashion. Heck, it might be the funniest thing about Master of Disguise, not one of Carvey’s better filmic efforts and certainly a far cry from the original Wayne’s World.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)