Josh Rivera walks differently when he is in New York City. He is not necessarily aware of it. It is more a force of habit. “My girlfriend is weird about it,” Rivera says of Rachel Zegler, the actress he starred with in West Side Story And The Hunger Games – The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. “She still teases me about it sometimes.”

The 29-year-old has a slight strut to appear more imposing, or at least to give the impression that strangers shouldn’t mess with him. This goes back to his high school days in Boulder, Colorado. As a teenager, he played football, but was also in the choir and in the theater, including musicals. His family also moved around a lot, and he adapted his physical appearance to each school clique or environment. “I don’t know if it works,” he says of his walk, “but it’s just what I do.”

The actor questioned his New York demeanor after landing the title role in FX’s American Sports History: Aaron Hernandezabout the New England Patriots tight end who was convicted of murdering semi-pro football player Odin Lloyd. Like most professional athletes, the Hernandez of the new anthology series exudes an aura of machoism, which he often uses as a facade to hide his sexual relationships with men. Like the real Hernandez, the character commits suicide in prison after being outed in the media.

Reflecting on his walk, Rivera notes, “I guess everyone does that on some level. I knew a bit about his relationship with these more masculine characters and how he tries to emulate them. I tried to reflect a little bit more of what it feels like to adapt to different environments and scenarios.”

Hernandez’s role and the larger sports cult have many facets. American sports history attempts to dissect. Led by Ryan Murphy’s frequent collaborators and executive producers Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson, the first season follows Hernandez’s private and public life. We see him over 10 episodes as a child living under the thumb of a father who punishes weakness, as a teen prodigy athlete in a very private relationship with a boy named Chris (Jake Cannavale) while publicly dating his future fiancée Shayanna Jenkins (Jaylen Barron), as a freshman at the University of Florida where he played alongside Tim Tebow (Patrick Schwarzenegger) on the Gators, and as a man struggling with drugs and the long-term effects of football-related head trauma. All of this leads to the fateful moment when he murders Odin.

“This is our sport as a country,” Jacobson says of football. “We’re the only ones who really care about it. It’s a huge part of the economy and our identity. So we wanted to explore all of those issues in it, the commodification of black and brown bodies at large, and all of the moments throughout this history where Football Inc. could have done something different in that regard: a guy who got in trouble, who showed signs of danger, but as long as that danger was on the field, it was banned from the field until it was no longer possible.”

Rivera has what he calls a “little conspiracy theory” about why he was cast in the role. The actor worked with Jacobson and Simpson on the Hunger Games prequel film, in which he played Sejanus Plinth, once a mentor to a tribute in the games who was forced to become a Peacekeeper soldier in District 12. For the Peacekeeper portion of the role, he had a shaved head, during which Jacobson wanted him to listen to Aaron Hernandez’s podcast. gladiatorby Wonderly and The Boston Globe — the same podcast that the producers adapted for American sports history“Then a few weeks went by and finally I got an audition tape for it,” he recalls.

Rivera tried not to get too emotionally involved in the audition in case he didn’t get the job, but when he did get it, he threw himself into the research with all his might. “It was difficult for me to not care whether I got the job or not, because from an actor’s point of view, the more complex something is, the more interesting it is, the more questions you have to ask yourself and the deeper you have to delve into your own psyche, and that, to me, is why I like it so much,” he says.

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At first, fear set in. Rivera was (and is) very careful to walk the line between imitation and impersonation. He wanted his performance to be the latter, not the former. Imitation, he says, doesn’t help the story. “It’s a pretty daunting prospect, feeling like I have to be someone else whose facts someone can easily check,” Rivera explains. “At a certain point, I have to choose a characterization, which is really hard and a big risk. You don’t want to seem disrespectful or anything, but I felt comfortable and confident with the amount of material I was given and with a team that was around me – but at first it was overwhelming. I’m not going to lie.”

What reassured him was the approach of showrunner Stuart Zicherman (The Americans, The psychiatrist next door). The season is an adaptation of the gladiator Podcast, and any adaptation comes with certain creative liberties. “It gave me a lot of freedom when the showrunner said we’re touching on a lot of things that are unknown, we need to tell the in-between,” Rivera continues. “That gave me a little bit more freedom to capture the essence of this character, to use the public appearances that I see, to use the differences in emphasis in the way this person speaks to their family versus their friends, and then use that to drive my own characterization. It’s true, it’s a difficult balancing act because you don’t want to conform to what everyone else knows about someone. It’s a different story. It’s an adaptation, not a documentary.”

Rivera was also tempted to brush up on his childhood football skills. For the high school sports scenes, producers hired extras who appeared smaller than their star to accentuate Hernandez’s size on camera. “I did a lot of football in high school, and I got a little too big for my britches,” Rivera admits. When it came time to shoot the college scenes with the Gators, “everyone was huge, dude,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘What happened?!'” Perhaps it’s because of his walking around New York and his experience moving between different environments as a child, but Rivera again adapted.

“‘I’m going to do the stunts, I’m going to do the football.’ And I kicked my ass, man,” he recalls, laughing. “I think I did about four or five setups and I thought, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do this.’ Football is pretty tough. Who would have thought?”

American Sports History: Aaron Hernandez Premieres on FX and Hulu on September 19.