‘American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez’: How a Monster Was Born

In 2009, star tight end Aaron Hernandez helped the Florida Gators win the national championship. In 2012, Hernandez played in the 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, he committed suicide in prison.

Here are the headlines of Hernandez’s short, violent life and death, details that transcend hardcore football fans and create an unbearable image 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 and dysfunctional family; was sexually abused as a boy; felt forced by social constraints to hide his homosexuality; was bitten and spat out by college football officials; and suffered severe brain damage, resulting in chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, which likely affected his behavior.

These nuances and more were uncovered and chronicled by the Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigative team in a 2018 news article series and podcast, which was later turned into a 2020 Netflix documentary series, “Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez.”

But these days, more Americans get their facts from scripted dramas than from news series, podcasts and documentaries, whether it’s “When They See Us,” Ava DuVernay’s Netflix limited series about the Central Park Five, or “American Crime Story,” which chronicles the O.J. Simpson saga and the murder of Gianni Versace. Now, the “American Crime Story” production team is expanding with “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez,” a 10-part account of Hernandez’s life and death based on the Globe’s reporting. The limited series 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 FX CEOs Nick Grad and John Landgraf told them the podcasts were coming out soon, so they read the Globe articles.

“There was this deep reporting that we love about our shows, and we started developing the show with the idea of ​​it being part of our various franchises around American culture,” he says.

Simpson says fellow executive producer Ryan Murphy was thrilled that it was a story about “a person with a fractured identity, which is the case with a lot of our shows.”

The report revealed a story that was “much more heartbreaking and complex than I thought it would be,” says Nina Jacobson, another executive producer. “When you think you know the story and then you come across something so deeply written, it really changes the way you see it (and) that always makes me stand on my guard.”

He added that since football is our national religion, Hernandez’s rise and fall “was not just the story of one person, but a reflection of us as a country.”

Many writers were interested in taking on the story, but producers chose Stuart Zicherman because of his résumé — Simpson cites “The Americans” — but also because he’s a die-hard football fan who still has the emotional distance to see the damage the game can do to people. Simpson says Zicherman had a compelling idea about the intersection of celebrity, sports, sexuality and masculinity.

“It’s character first, football second, and what sets this story apart from a million sports stories is the story of Aaron, his family, his teammates and his coaches,” he says. “It becomes a Shakespearean tragedy with fascinating characters at the center.”

Zicherman says that when he first pitched it, he had a huge scroll that, when unrolled, showed all the twists and turns in the story. “I love writing about stories that people think they know but really don’t,” 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 used the concept of “American Crime Story,” which involves “taking a crime or an event and presenting it as something much larger within the context of the American fabric.”

The series explores the themes of toxic masculinity at home and in locker rooms, the violence on the football pitch that can spill over into everyday life, and how a dysfunctional family can be both a support and a trap.

There’s also the issue of CTE, a brain injury caused by repeated blows to the head. “We certainly don’t want to say that CTE is what made Aaron a murderer — he was exposed to violence and was prone to violence — but he became very paranoid and even more violent,” Zicherman says, noting that Hernandez’s drug use would also have worsened his brain injuries.

He uses history to show the people and institutions that directly harmed Hernandez, or at least failed to “change the narrative” due to their own selfish motives, like then-Florida coach Urban Meyer, who seduced Hernandez and his family with promises he didn’t keep, then shoved the young man out the door when he became a challenge.

“We commoditize our athletes and don’t always see what’s best for them,” Zicherman says. “The Patriots were also blinded by his talent.

“But I also want viewers to see that there’s a much bigger picture and that we’re all partly responsible — we raise our athletes, we pay them a fortune and we build them up to be heroes,” he says, but he turns his back on them when things go wrong.

Beyond the bigger picture, Zicherman focused on Hernandez’s story as someone “trying to find his true self,” giving it a heart as Hernandez jumps from childhood to high school to Florida to the NFL and ultimately to the world of drugs and crime that consumed him. “He went crazy at the end because of all the secrets he was keeping.”

Zicherman says the Spotlight Globe team not only provided a meticulous and in-depth story, but also allowed him to come to Boston “to ask a million questions,” and then visit the writers’ room to answer even more. “They talked to everyone and did the work, and they were a huge resource,” he says.

But journalists and documentary filmmakers are limited by what they can prove. Zicherman says the series resists overt fiction, but they felt it needed to go further than the Spotlight series.

“We spent a lot of time in the writers’ room connecting the dots and trying to emotionally understand why certain things were happening and then come up with answers,” he says.

The most important thing was to find out why Hernandez killed Lloyd. “It always bugged me that in all the research, no one knew,” Zicherman says. “It was a half-hearted attempt that seemed unplanned and made no sense.”

There are theories that Hernandez wanted to keep his sexual orientation and his involvement in the double homicide a secret, but Zicherman believes it was more about how low Hernandez had fallen.

“I built the murder out of a stew of all the moments in the season,” Zicherman says. “Hernandez has so many secrets and he’s drugged them, and he’s paranoid as hell because he’s been hit in the head so many times. It’s all of those things; I don’t think it’s one thing.”

Aside from the scripts, the most important factor would be casting Hernandez. Here, the team got lucky. Jacobson was a producer on “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Birds and the Snakes” and had watched Josh Rivera work. “I really got to see what he was made of,” she says of Rivera, who previously played Chino in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.” “He’s an incredibly refined, down-to-earth, natural, charismatic actor. And he was that way in every take.”

But while Jacobson was convinced, she also trusted Murphy’s judgment and wanted to let the auditions play out on their own “to see if he, too, would be at the top of Ryan’s shortlist.”

At the end of the auditions, after mixing and matching the actors auditioning for the different roles, Murphy turned around and said, “Well, it’s Josh, of course,” so they called him back before he could leave the audition.

Zicherman says that many other actors emphasized the violence and darkness, but Rivera “played the vulnerability and the other emotional elements and the visceral emotion. Once we had him, I started taking the dialogue out to let the moments play on his face—the other characters could talk and we could see his heartbreak.”

(Rivera, he adds, is also “a goofball who likes to sing and dance and tell jokes,” and Hernandez, before things went wrong, was the class clown.)

Rivera is in almost every scene. Simpson notes that he had to work out regularly to stay big and endure hours of tattoo makeup. “He carried it off incredibly well and was always up for the game and enthusiastic,” Simpson says. “He was often exhausted, but the fact that he didn’t go into a dark place is a testament to who Josh is as a person. He set the tone for the whole set.”

Simpson recalls only one day when Rivera was understandably overwhelmed. “We were in a muddy field at 3 a.m., reenacting the murder of Odin Lloyd, and there was a moment where Josh had to stop. He turned to everyone and said, ‘This is just too incredibly sad,’” Simpson says. “I think we were all haunted by that moment.”