In 2009, superstar tight end Aaron Hernandez helped the Florida Gators win a national championship. In 2012, Hernandez played in a Super Bowl for the New England Patriots and signed a $40 million contract extension.
But that same year he was investigated for a double homicide. A year later he shot Alexander Bradley, one of his best friends, in the eye and murdered another man, Odin Lloyd. Two years later, Hernandez was convicted of Odin's murder, and in 2017, Hernandez committed suicide while in prison.
Those are the headlines of Hernandez’s brief, violent life and death, the details that reach beyond the diehard football fan and create an image that’s hard to shake in popular culture. While Hernandez clearly had drug problems, committed violent crimes and became increasingly paranoid, his fuller story is complicated: Hernandez suffered physical abuse in a violent, dysfunctional family; he was sexually abused as a child; he felt compelled by society’s strictures to hide his homosexuality; he was chewed up and spit out by the powers that be in college football; and his brain was severely damaged, resulting in chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, which likely affected his behavior.
The Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigative team uncovered and exposed those nuances and more in 2018, in a series of news articles and a podcast. That was followed by a Netflix docuseries in 2020, “Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez.”
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1. Aaron Hernandez in 2009 when he played for Florida. (Dave Martin/Associated Press) 2. In 2015, Hernandez during jury deliberations in his murder trial. (AP Background)
But these days, more Americans get their facts from scripted series than from newspaper series, podcasts and documentaries — whether it’s “When They See Us,” Ava DuVernay’s Netflix miniseries about the Central Park Five, or the “American Crime Story” retellings of the O.J. Simpson saga and the murder of Gianni Versace. Now, the “American Crime Story” production team is branching out with “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez,” a 10-episode take on Hernandez’s life and death based on the Globe’s reporting. The miniseries premieres Tuesday at 10 p.m. on FX with two episodes and streams the next day on Hulu.
Brad Simpson, one of the show's executive producers, says top FX executives Nick Grad and John Landgraf tipped them off that podcasts were about to launch, so they read the Globe articles.
“It had that depth of information that we love to have in our shows, and we began developing the series with an eye toward it being part of our various franchises about American culture,” he says.
Simpson says fellow executive producer Ryan Murphy loved that this was a story about “a person with a fractured identity, like a lot of our shows.”
The report revealed a story that was “much more heartbreaking and complex than I had considered,” says Nina Jacobson, another executive producer. “When you think you know a story and then you come across something deeply reported, it really changes the way you look at it.” [and] “That always makes me stand up and stand firm.”
She adds that since football is our national religion, Hernandez's rise and fall “was not just the story of one person but a mirror for us as a country.”
Numerous writers were interested in tackling the story, but the producers chose Stuart Zicherman because of his resume (Simpson cites “The Americans”) but also because he is a passionate football fan who nonetheless has the emotional distance to see the harm the game can do to people. Simpson says Zicherman had a compelling point about the intersection of celebrity, sport, sexuality and masculinity.
“It’s all about the characters and football second, and what makes this story different from a million sports stories is Aaron’s story, as well as that of his family, the people on his team and the coaches,” he says. “It becomes a Shakespearean tragedy with compelling characters at the center.”
Zicherman says he submitted his initial proposal with a huge scroll that, when unfolded, showed all the twists and turns of the story. “I love writing about stories that people think they know but they don’t really,” he says. “We tend to label people, and Hernandez was a monster, but no one is born a monster, and I wanted to tell that story without forgiving him for what he did.”
Zicherman drew on the “American Crime Story” concept of “taking one crime or event and turning it into something much bigger in the social fabric of America.”
The show explores toxic masculinity at home and in the locker room, how violence on the football field can spill over into everyday life, and how a dysfunctional family can be both a support and a trap.
Aaron Hernandez, left, in 2011 as a tight end for the New England Patriots. After his death, Hernandez was found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease.
(Elise Amendola/Associated Press)
There’s also the issue of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain injury caused by repeated blows to the head. “Obviously, we don’t want to say that CTE was what turned Aaron into a killer — he had been exposed to violence and was prone to violence — but he became very paranoid and had an even more irascible temper,” Zicherman says, noting that Hernandez’s drug use would have also exacerbated his brain injuries.
It lays out the story to show the people and institutions that directly harmed Hernandez or at least failed to “change the narrative” because of their own selfish motivations, such as then-Florida coach Urban Meyer, who lured Hernandez and his family with promises he didn’t keep and then pushed the young man out the door when he became defiant.
“We turn our athletes into commodities and don’t always see what’s best for them,” Zicherman says. “The Patriots were also blinded by their talent.
“But I also want the public to see that there's a much bigger picture here and that we're all a bit complicit: we raise our athletes, pay them a fortune and make them heroes,” he says, only to turn on them when things go wrong.
Beyond the big picture, Zicherman focused on Hernandez’s story as someone “trying to find his authentic self,” giving him a story line that saw him move from childhood to high school to Florida to the NFL and eventually into the world of drugs and crime that consumed him. “In the end, he went crazy with all the secrets he was keeping.”
Zicherman says the Globe’s Spotlight team not only provided him with a thorough and complete story, but they allowed him to come to Boston “to ask a million questions” and then visited the writers’ room to answer even more. “They had talked to everybody and done that work, and they were a tremendous resource,” he says.
But journalists and documentary filmmakers are limited by what they can show. Zicherman says the series resists overt fiction, but felt it had to go beyond the Spotlight series.
Josh Rivera as Aaron Hernandez, who was convicted of murdering Odin Lloyd, in a scene from “American Sports Story.”
(Eric Liebowitz / Special Effects)
“In the writers room we spend a lot of time connecting the dots and trying to emotionally understand why things happen and come up with answers to things,” he says.
The most important thing was to explain why Hernandez killed Lloyd. “It always bothered me that in the whole investigation, no one knew about it,” Zicherman says. “It was a clumsy attempt that seemed unpremeditated and made no sense.”
Theories include that Hernandez wanted to keep his sexuality or his involvement in the double homicide a secret, but Zicherman believes it had more to do with how low Hernandez had stooped.
“I built the murder out of all the moments that we’ve had throughout the season,” Zicherman says. “Hernandez is hiding a lot of secrets and mixing it up with drug use, and he’s paranoid as hell because he’s taken so many hits to the head. It’s a combination of all those things; I don’t think it was a one-off.”
Beyond the scripts, the biggest factor would be casting Hernandez. In this case, the team got lucky. Jacobson was producing “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” and watching Josh Rivera in action. “I got to really see what he was made of,” she says of Rivera, who previously co-starred as Chino in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.” “He’s an incredibly sophisticated, down-to-earth, natural and charismatic actor. And he was that in every take.”
But while Jacobson was convinced, she also trusted Murphy's judgment and wanted to let the audition process play out “to see if he would come out on top for Ryan, too.”
At the end of the callbacks, after mixing and matching actors vying for various jobs, Murphy turned around and said, “Well, obviously it's Josh,” so he was called back before he could leave the audition.
Zicherman says that many of the other actors emphasized the violence and darkness, but Rivera “played the vulnerability and other emotional components and the inner emotionality. Once we had that, I started removing the dialogue to let the moments come through on his face; the other characters could talk and we could see his anguish.”
(Rivera, he adds, is also a “fool who likes to sing, dance and tell jokes,” and Hernandez, before things went wrong, was the class clown.)
Rivera appears in nearly every scene. Simpson notes that he had to work out regularly to stay strong and endured several hours of makeup for the tattoos. “He handled it incredibly well and was always willing and enthusiastic,” Simpson says. “He was often exhausted, but the fact that he didn’t fall into a dark place is a testament to who Josh is as a human being. He set the tone for the set.”
Simpson remembers just one day when Rivera felt, understandably, overwhelmed by the task. “We were in a muddy field at 3 in the morning reenacting the murder of Odin Lloyd, and there was a moment where Josh had to stop. He turned to everyone and said, ‘This is incredibly sad,’” Simpson says. “I think that moment haunted all of us.”
