Aaron Hernandez played his first-ever NFL game for the New England Patriots over a decade ago on September 12, 2010 against the Cincinnati Bengals. The following week, the 20-year-old former Florida Gators star, who helped his team win the national championship the year before, dazzled the league with six pass catches and 101 receiving yards. Three years later, just one year after playing in the Super Bowl and signing a $40 million contract extension, police escorted the NFL star out of his mansion. in handcuffs for the murder of his former friend Odin Lloyd. Soon after, he was linked to a double murder and implicated in several others. On April 19, 2017, just seven years after his NFL debut, he was found dead in his prison cell, hanging from a bedsheet. It was an apparent suicide, allegedly triggered by a radio show in which he was outed as gay.
Combine these details with court recordings and voice messages, and it’s no wonder Oxygen aired the two-part series Aaron Hernandez revealsAnd The Boston Globe and Wondery has stopped the podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc. just one year after his death. Two more documentary series — Aaron Hernandez: An ID Crime And Killer Inside: The Ghost of Aaron Hernandez by Netflix – discontinued in 2020. And now there is American Sports History: Aaron Hernandezthe first part of a new anthology series by Ryan Murphy and his team from American crime history for FX.
Created by Stuart “Stu” Zicherman, whose credits include The Americans And The affair, American sports historygrounded by The Boston Globe‘s extensive coverage in their own backyard along with their gladiator Podcast, is partly based on the 2016 The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Storybut with a deeper, internal lens. What they discovered surprised even the creator/showrunner.
“I am a big football fan and thought I knew this story,” says Zicherman The Hollywood Reporter“When I read The Boston Globe Spotlight piece and then the podcast that followed, I realized there was so much more here that I didn’t know. And I always like to tell stories that an audience thinks they know and then shed new light on them.”
Zicherman stresses that Hernandez’s story “is not as one-dimensional as people think. I was always just given the idea that Aaron was a monster, right? He was a murderer, a killer, a monster. And when you start looking into something like that, you’re reminded that nobody is born a murderer. You’re not born a monster, and so you start to really examine why and how. I think we were trying not to forgive him for what he did, but at the same time show the world that there’s something bigger at play here, right? There are institutions and people along the way, for athletes, that don’t necessarily see them as people. They’re objects, they’re vessels. And so we tried to approach it with the complexity that I think was actually there.”
Exploring this complexity in ten episodes was a delicate process. “I tried to put together a team of writers that had many different views on the story, who had very different backgrounds and orientations. (I) even hired a former NFL player and gave him his first job as a writer,” Zicherman explains.
His approach, he continues, was to “take every part of Hernandez and look at it closely in the writers’ room. Aaron was always described as a chameleon. He had all these different personalities and parts to him. We took on big themes and big ideas – violence, drug use, abuse, sexuality – all these different things, and we really tried to explore them, talk about them and figure out how they affected the story.”
Finding the core theme was a little harder, but they landed on authenticity. “I’m not a football player,” Zicherman explains, “but authenticity is something I can relate to, anyone can relate to. All of us are trying to figure out who we are at some point in our lives, and most of us are given a little bit of leeway and freedom to figure that out. Aaron wasn’t, because of the body he was born into and the world he was born into. And I thought that was a very emotional starting point.”
It wasn’t easy to find someone who could embody the many different sides of Hernandez – from his difficult childhood experiences in Bristol, Connecticut, to the unexpected loss of his father, who harshly admonished and abused him as a teenager, to his entry into the college sports machine and later the NFL, all while battling society’s toxic masculinity expectations that counteracted his attraction to the same sex.
“I was a little panicked,” Zicherman admits. “When you write a show like this, you’re always a little afraid that you’re never going to find the right actor for the role, because ‘Who is this guy?’ You think, ‘I need someone who looks like a football player but has a lot of emotion and complexity.'”
Zicherman and his team found that Josh Rivera, who some may know from his role as Chino in West Side Story And The Hunger Games – The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes“I think it’s easier for actors who take on this role to play the darkness, to play the violence, to play the tough guy. It’s much harder for people in auditions to play the other side, the emotionality and the vulnerability. And Josh just manages to portray that vulnerability in a very unique way,” says Zicherman.
Like Hernandez, Rivera is of Puerto Rican descent and even played a little football in high school. But these coincidences were not Rivera’s entry point to Hernandez. “At first I tried to use the reports that many of his friends and family members had about him – that he was a nice person. He had a good mood. He was charismatic,” Rivera says. THR. “I think that’s the really interesting part: How is this person capable of all this? I tried to use that perspective as a foundation and then use certain traumatic events, situations or circumstances to add these layers that make it a little more complex until eventually you don’t really recognize the person from the first episode anymore.”
Rivera paid particular attention to Hernandez’s inner turmoil and his environment. This turmoil is reflected in the first episode of American crime history. Viewers are introduced to Hernandez’s dual identity as the opening scenes begin with him being paranoid at a strip club about spotting guys he thinks are cops (as played in Ciara’s “Ride”), and then move on to him shooting his friend at point blank range in his SUV and then accepting an award for being a role model for youth. But the bulk of this episode shows the younger Aaron Hernandez trying to live up to his father’s very early expectations that he play in the NFL while also wrestling with his sexuality.
“I tried to start from someone who basically has constant imposter syndrome and is battling it,” Rivera says. “His upbringing was very rocky and his relationship with masculinity was very rocky. I had these little anchors (of him) that he wanted to belong, wanted to be the best and had a complicated relationship with his identity. I had these little things that I tried to pull everything from that revolve around this core essence of someone who is really just a boy trying to be a man or seem like a man, who is tough and has it all together.”
By the end of the second episode, it is crystal clear that Hernandez has juggled much more than anyone could have imagined. But it is also clear that American crime history did something extraordinary. It presented a complex portrait of a man of color, a Latino, who committed horrific crimes, and got people interested enough to wonder why. When it comes to Jeffrey Dahmer and other white men, such television portrayals are not unusual. But when it comes to doing the same to a person of color, there are even more layers to it. As horrific and unforgivable as Hernandez’s crimes against his victims are, he also betrayed the American dream that is sold to many people of color: he made it to the top and blew it.
“It’s an interesting balancing act,” Rivera says. “Because I think unfortunately, on a broad level, people are less inclined to show empathy in situations involving people of color (but) it doesn’t change the crime either. So it’s difficult because you don’t want to romanticize this thing.”
In a country where race and socioeconomic status still play a large role, a miniseries of this magnitude that delves deeper into the subject and questions who the person in the headline is or has become is groundbreaking.
“It’s a profound thing to grapple with and be able to explain it and not explain how to forgive. I think it’s just the context that makes the story so much more interesting,” Rivera says. “But on the other hand, you can’t absolve anyone of responsibility.”
American Sports History: Aaron Hernandez releases new episodes Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on FX and Hulu.
