LOS ANGELES – Football star Aaron Hernandez’s life was like an onion: Peel one layer and there was another to consider.
A tight end with the New England Patriots, he was convicted of shooting his friend Odin Lloyd in an industrial park a mile away from Hernandez’s home. While serving time in prison, he was also indicted for the double homicide of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado. Days after being acquitted of the crime, he was found dead in his cell. The death was ruled a suicide.
What led to Hernandez’s death? A troubled childhood? A pushy father? A drug habit? Homophobia? A brain injury from taking too many hits?
Josh Rivera as Aaron Hernandez and Jaylen Barron as Shayanna Jenkins star in "American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez."
For actor Josh Rivera, who plays Hernandez in “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez,” a Rubik’s cube of moves flooded his mind while preparing for the series.
“My job as an actor was to approach him with empathy,” Rivera says. “First, I needed to figure out the why: What could push a person to feel like they have no other choice other than to do what they end up doing? It’s a hard question.”
The limited series, he says, could add perspective to the conclusions people have reached. “At the very least, it’s food for thought.”
A complex story
Josh Rivera plays Aaron Hernandez in "American Sports Story."
The idea that a brain injury might have led Hernandez to act the way did 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 Shayanna Jenkins, Hernandez’s wife, says society had an opinion about him before they even considered what might have prompted his behavior. “Not once did anybody think for a second, ‘Oh, there’s something wrong with him,’” she says.
“American Sports Story” “does a really good job of showing the pressure that was coming at Aaron,” says Norbert Leo Butz, who plays Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick. “Race does fit into this.”
Football, he adds, is much like acting. “You’re up one day, you’re down the next. The pressure to deliver is not easy. It’s not easy to be there Sunday, on the 50-yard line, doing a snap. It’s also not easy to have 80 people around you and a camera up your face and saying all the right things: ‘Deliver.’ What I related to most about it was that depression.”
Higher standards
Josh Rivera as Aaron Hernandez.
Putting athletes, actors, even religious leaders on “impossibly high pedestals” can cause problems. “That culture of winning at all costs, that pressure put on the shoulders of a 19-, 20-year-old person who had just lost his father is great,” Butz adds.
While Rivera played football in high school, he didn’t consider a career in sports. “It was just a great time…and I remember telling my coach that I didn’t want to play football the year after that. He was really disappointed…so I hope he sees this show.”
For the limited series, football plays were mapped out like Broadway choreography.
“It was pretty neat finding the parallels between football and theater,” Rivera says. “The only real difference between running choreography and running a football play is in a football game, you don’t know what the other team is going to do, but you still have an idea what’s supposed to happen.”
Learning the ropes
Butz, a two-time Tony winner and star of “Wicked,” is not a football fanatic. “I can count on one hand the amount of football games I’ve seen in my life,” he admits. “I grew up playing baseball and soccer. Why would you elect to let a 300-pound human being run at you 30-, 40-miles an hour? So I had to start from zero – which was a great place to start. If he had loomed large in my mind, I wouldn’t have known where to start. But the scripts were so good…and I did a lot of YouTube research. This guy did press conferences for four years. There are at least three major biographies written on the guy and I found I had to stop. It’s a rabbit hole you can go down and kind of get stuck in.”
Similarly, Rivera.
Josh Andrés Rivera as Aaron Hernandez. CR: Michael Parmelee/FX
Barron’s character, Shayanna Jenkins, has a solid social media presence, so she had resources. “I really had to figure out who she was through Aaron’s eyes,” she says. “I hope I did her justice; I hope she really enjoys what we did because we really painting her in a positive light.”
As one of the people Hernandez could count on, Jenkins might have been someone who could have helped him, had she been there earlier in his life. “She was always the voice of reason,” Barron says. “She would always tell him the truth but, ultimately, it was up to him. This was a grown man who made his own decisions.”
A brain injury might have explained many of the decisions Hernandez made. But, says Butz, Hernandez was someone who “struggled with finding his authentic self. He wasn’t afforded the opportunity.”
Adds Rivera: “There were a lot of people who had things to gain from his talent – financially and clout-wise. There were a lot of things he chased in order to feel some kind of acceptance. Religion was one of them. That benefited him for a little while but, unfortunately, it didn’t change what happened.”
"American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez" airs Sept. 17 on FX and streams the next day on Hulu.
