Aaron Hernandez played his very first NFL game for the New England Patriots more than a decade ago, on September 12, 2010, against the Cincinnati Bengals. The following week, the 20-year-old former Florida Gators star, who had helped his team win a national championship the year before, hit with six receptions and 101 receiving yards and sent the league into a tizzy. Three years later, just one year after playing in the Super Bowl and signing a $40 million contract extension, police escorted the NFL star from his mansion in handcuffs for the murder of one-time friend Odin Lloyd. Shortly thereafter, he was linked to a double homicide and implicated in others. On April 19, 2017, just seven years after his NFL debut, he was found dead, hanging from a bedsheet, in his prison cell in an apparent suicide, allegedly prompted by a radio show that had outed him as gay.
Add to that the courtroom footage and voicemails, and it's no wonder Oxygen aired the series in two parts. Aaron Hernandez discoveredAND The Boston Globe and Wondery launched the podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc just a year after his death. Two more docuseries — Aaron Hernandez: A Murder Mystery AND Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez from Netflix — dropped in 2020. And now there's American Sports History: Aaron Hernandezthe first of a new anthology series from Ryan Murphy and his team of Story of an American Crime for special effects.
Created by Stuart “Stu” Zicherman, whose credits include The Americans AND The deal, American Sports Historyfounded by The Boston Globetheir large coverage in their yard along with their Gladiator podcast, presumably inspired by the 2016 one The People vs. OJ Simpson: American Crime Storybut with a deeper, internal lens. What they discovered surprised even its creator/showrunner.
“I'm a big football fan and I thought I knew this story,” Zicherman says. The Hollywood Reporter. “When I read The Boston Globe featured piece and then [listened to] the next podcast, I realized there was a lot more here that I didn't know. And I always like to tell stories that people think they know, and then shed new light on them.”
Zicherman insists that Hernandez's story “isn't as one-dimensional as people think. I've always had this idea that Aaron was a monster, right? He was a murderer, a killer, a monster. And when you start to get into something like that, you remember that nobody's born a murderer. You're not born a monster, and then you start to really look at the why and the how. I think what we tried to do was not condone him for what he did, but at the same time, show the world that there's a bigger thing at play here, right? There are institutions and people along the way, for athletes, that don't necessarily think of them as people. They're objects, they're containers. And so we tried to approach it with the complexity that I think was actually there.”
Exploring that complexity in 10 episodes was a delicate process. “I tried to assemble a writing staff that had many different points of view on the story, that had very different backgrounds, different orientations. [I] They even brought in a former NFL player and gave him his first writing assignment,” Zicherman explains.
His approach, he continues, was to “take every part of Hernandez and look at it in depth in the writers' room. Aaron has always been described as a chameleon. He had all these different personalities and parts of 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 and talk about them and figure out how they affected the story.”
Getting to the central theme was a little more complicated, but they went for authenticity. “I'm not a football player,” Zicherman explains, “but authenticity is something I can relate to, anyone can relate to. We all at some point in our lives are trying to figure out who we are, and most of us are given a little bit of freedom and agency to figure that out. Aaron was not that because of the body he was born in, and the world he was born into. And I thought that was a really exciting place to start.”
It was no easy task finding someone who could embody the many different sides of Hernandez, from his troubled childhood home in Bristol, Connecticut, to the unexpected loss of his father, who was both punitive and abusive as a teenager, to his involvement in college sports and later the NFL, while struggling with society’s toxic expectations of masculinity that countered his same-sex attraction.
“I had a little panic,” 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 to play it, because ‘Who is that 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 in Josh Rivera, who might be familiar to some from his roles as Chino in The History of the West Side AND The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Serpents. “I think it's easier for actors who come into this part in particular 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 vulnerability. And Josh is just able to access that vulnerability in a really unique way,” Zicherman says.
Like Hernandez, Rivera is of Puerto Rican descent and even played a little football in high school. But those coincidences weren't Rivera's entry point to Hernandez. “Initially, the basis I tried to use were the stories that a lot of his friends and family had about him, which was that he was a sweet person. He was good-humored. He was charismatic,” Rivera says. DAY“I think that's the really interesting part: How is this same person capable of all this? I tried to use that perspective as a foundation and then use certain events or situations or traumatic circumstances to add these layers that make it a little more complex until by the end you don't recognize the person from the first episode anymore.”
Rivera paid particular attention to Hernandez's inner turmoil and his environment. That turmoil is established immediately in the first episode of Story of an American Crime. Viewers are introduced to Hernandez’s dual identity as early scenes transition from him in the strip club paranoid about spotting guys he thinks are cops, as Ciara’s “Ride” plays, to him shooting his friend point-blank in his SUV and then accepting a role model award. But the bulk of that episode shows young Aaron Hernandez trying to live up to his father’s early expectations of him playing in the NFL, while also struggling with his sexuality.
“I tried to come from a point of view of basically someone with perpetual impostor syndrome who is struggling with that,” Rivera says. “His upbringing was very difficult, and his relationship with masculinity was very difficult. I had these little anchors. [of him] need to be the best, wanting to fit in, having a complicated relationship with his identity. I had these little things that I was trying to bring out that were all about this core essence of someone who is really just a guy who's trying to be a man or who's trying to appear as a man who's tough and has this stuff under control.”
By the end of the second episode, it's crystal clear that Hernandez has done far more than anyone could have imagined. But it's also clear that Story of an American Crime has done something extraordinary. And that is: present a complex portrait of a black man, a Latino man, who committed horrific crimes, and make people care enough to think about why. When it comes to Jeffrey Dahmer and other white men, these kinds of TV treatments are not uncommon. But there are additional layers when it comes to doing the same for a black person. As horrific and unforgivable as Hernandez’s crimes against his victims are, he has also betrayed the American dream that many black people are sold: he rose to the top and ruined it.
“It’s an interesting tightrope to walk,” Rivera says. “Because I think, unfortunately, in the mainstream, people are less inclined to lead with empathy in situations involving people of color. [but] also, it doesn't change the crime. So it's difficult because you don't want to romanticize this thing.”
In a country where race and socioeconomic status continue to play a major role, having a limited series of this magnitude that digs deeper into the personality or history of the person at the center of the title is revolutionary.
“It's a deep thing to deal with and to be able to explain and not explain in order to forgive. It's just the context that I think makes the story much more interesting,” Rivera says. “But that being said, you can't let anyone off the hook.”
American Sports History: Aaron Hernandez releases new episodes every Tuesday at 10pm on FX and Hulu.