FX’s ‘American Sports Story’ Shines a Light on Aaron Hernandez

A tight end for the New England Patriots, he was convicted of shooting his friend Odin Lloyd in an industrial park a mile from Hernandez’s home. While serving his prison sentence, he was also charged with the double murders of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado. Days after his acquittal, he was found dead in his cell, a death ruled a suicide.

What led to Hernandez’s death? A troubled childhood? An overbearing father? Drug addiction? Homophobia? Brain trauma from too many hits?

Actor Josh Rivera, who plays Hernandez in “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez,” thought about a Rubik’s Cube while preparing for the show.

“My job as an actor was to approach him with empathy,” Rivera says. “First, I had to figure out why: What would make someone feel like they had no choice but to do what they ended up doing? That’s a tough question.”

A limited series, he says, could add perspective to the conclusions people have reached. “At least it’s something to think about.”

The idea that a brain injury may have led Hernandez to act this way complicates the athlete’s story. “There were so many factors working against him,” Rivera says. “That’s why it’s so hard to pinpoint one thing in his life.”

Jaylen Barron, who plays Hernandez’s wife, Shayanna Jenkins, says society had an opinion of him before it considered what might have motivated his behavior. “There was never a time when anyone thought, ‘Oh, there’s something wrong with him,’” she says.

“American Sports Story” “does a really good job of showing the pressure Aaron was under,” says Norbert Leo Butz, who plays Patriots coach Bill Belichick. “Race fits into that.”

Football, he adds, is a lot like acting. “One day you’re up, the next you’re down. The pressure to give your all is not easy. It’s not easy to be there on Sunday, on the 50-yard line, taking a picture. It’s not easy to have 80 people around you, a camera in your face, saying all the right things: ‘Give it your all.’ What I relate to the most is that depression.”

Putting athletes, actors and even religious leaders on “impossibly high pedestals” can cause problems. “This culture of winning at all costs, this pressure on a 19-, 20-year-old who has just lost his father, is great,” Butz adds.

Although Rivera played football in high school, he didn’t think about pursuing a career in the sport. “It was just a great time… and I remember telling my coach I didn’t want to play football a year later. He was really disappointed… so I hope he watches the show.”

For the limited series, the football plays are choreographed like a Broadway show.

“It was pretty cool to find parallels between football and theater,” Rivera says. “The only real difference between directing a choreography and directing a football game is that in a football game, you don’t know what the other team is going to do, but you still have an idea of ​​what’s going to happen.”

Butz, a two-time Tony Award winner and star of “Wicked,” is no football fan. “I can count on one hand the number of football games I’ve seen in my life,” he admits. “I grew up playing baseball and football. Why would you let a 300-pound guy run at you 30, 40 miles an hour? So I had to start from scratch—which was a great starting point. If he was in my head, I wouldn’t know where to start. But the scripts were so good… and I did a lot of research on YouTube. This guy did press conferences for four years. There were at least three major biographies about him, and I decided I had to stop. It’s a rabbit hole you can go down and get stuck in.”

Barron’s character, Shayanna Jenkins, has a solid social media presence, so she had resources. “I really had to understand who she was through Aaron’s eyes,” she says. “I hope I did her justice; I hope she really likes what we did because we really portrayed her in a positive light.”

As one of the people Hernandez could count on, Jenkins could have been someone who could have helped him if she had been there earlier in his life. “She was always the voice of reason,” Barron says. “She always told him the truth, but ultimately, he made his own decisions. He was a grown man who made his own decisions.”

The brain injury could explain many of the decisions Hernandez made. But, Butz says, Hernandez was someone who “had trouble finding his authentic self. He wasn’t given that opportunity.”

Rivera adds, “There were a lot of people who stood to gain from his talent—financially and in terms of influence. There were a lot of things he chased to feel some form of acceptance. Religion was one of them. It helped him for a while, but unfortunately it didn’t change what happened.”

“American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez” will air on FX on September 17 and will be available on Hulu the following day.