Yes, Dana Carvey prayed about 9/11 while in his Master Of Disguise turtle suit

For years now, there’s been an extremely weird bit of lore that circulates on the internet every once in a while, about Dana Carvey’s infamous 2002 comedy Master Of Disguise. Specifically, that the film’s Turtle Club scene—as close to a “signature scene” as a movie like this can get—was filmed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and that, before beginning filming in the aftermath of the attack, the cast and crew of the film got together to have a moment of silence for the victims.

(And here’s where we should be very clear that the Turtle Club scene was not, despite what people say sometimes, actually filmed on 9/11; production on the film hadn’t started when the attacks happened, and didn’t begin until a few weeks after. The Turtle Club was just the first scene to be filmed.)

This story has always fascinated people, we suspect, because it’s a very specific blend of the incredibly solemn and the ridiculously absurd; the creators of one of the dumbest comedies ever made taking a moment to be understandably very human about a massive and awful historical moment. And that bizarre juxtaposition has now only been heightened for us, as, after two decades of speculation, Dana Carvey has finally confirmed: Yes, he was in the Turtle Man suit when this famed prayer circle actually happened.

This is per a recent episode of Fly On The Wall, the podcast Carvey does with David Spade, in which they got on the topic of Master Of Disguise. Here’s Carvey, per The New York Post:

It’s kind of a sensitive topic, but after 9/11 I was shooting a movie called Master Of Disguise. 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. I was in [the costume] all that day, and then they said, “We’re going to have a group prayer about 9/11.” 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.”

On Spade’s prompting, Carvey admits that he can’t remember if they got the “shell” part of his costume off for the moment, but confirms for certain that he was wearing the bald cap and the facial prosthetics. (Defector’s “At The Turtle Club In The Shadow Of 9/11,” perhaps the definitive history of this moment—including interviews with director Perry Blake, who organized the moment—states that “Carvey was in full turtle get-up,” for what it’s worth.) And you can see it now, can’t you? The image is so pure in our minds’ eyes: Carvey’s shiny bald head bowed in the face of the unimaginable; lips weighed down both by the solemnity of the moment, and also by his prosthetic beak; hands clasped in solidarity with the normal-looking people on either side. What an odd, beautiful moment it makes for; what an odd, beautiful world this is.