‘American Sports Story’: Josh Rivera on the Anxiety and Ache Behind Aaron Hernandez
Ryan Murphy is back with a new anthology series that explores the inner workings of one of America’s most hallowed institutions via a tragic and true story. In the inaugural season of American Sports Story, Murphy dives into the rise and fall of Aaron Hernandez, the New England Patriots star who battled inner demons and was accused of multiple murders; he was convicted of one of them, the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd.
On a new episode of Still Watching, hosts Hillary Busis, Richard Lawson, and Chris Murphy unpack the first two episodes of American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez and chat with Josh Rivera, who portrays Hernandez, about getting into professional-athlete shape—and how making the series changed his feelings about football.
In his review of American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, Lawson calls the new series “a worthwhile examination of a murderer’s motivations” and praises Rivera’s performance. “It is, in many ways, the role of a lifetime, an opportunity to explore extremes of the human experience that Rivera seizes with controlled gusto,” writes Lawson. In conversation with Busis, Rivera, who was part of the first national tour of Hamilton and starred in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake, reveals that he actually played high school football, though he ditched it as his passion for musical theater grew.
“I thought about it really seriously for a little while,” he says in regard to sticking with football. “It’s just a monumental time commitment that made it really difficult to do anything else, and at that time I was starting to get really into singing and performing. I had performed in front of an audience for the first time, like, my sophomore year of high school…. It was something I started to pursue a little bit more seriously, and it just conflicted with football a little bit.”
Getting back into shape was easier said than done for Rivera. He had just three months to transform his body into that of a star NFL tight end after booking the role. “It was just like, you just gotta get as big as you can by April,” he says. With the help of a personal trainer, he was able to pack on the pounds. “I was 185 pounds, and I gained about 30 pounds, which was crazy,” Rivera continues. “I didn’t know that that was naturally possible. It was, like, five days a week in the gym, and I was just eating as much as I could possibly eat.”
Even more arduous than the physical toll was the mental toll of playing someone as notorious as Hernandez. Rivera shares that he had anxiety about taking on the part and found the task at hand “very daunting in the beginning.”
“I’m very motivated by not making a fool of myself,” Rivera says. “I don’t consider myself, like, a controversial person. I don’t want anybody to be offended or feel insulted in any way…. I want it to be truthful, and ultimately my job is to take all the information that I’m given and the resources that are available and paint a picture with that.”
As much as he was portraying the life and times of Hernandez, Rivera is aware that American Sports Story is about more than a single man. “The story that we tell is kind of a larger story of the societal implication and the amount of enabling that a lot of people have in their athletic career,” he says. “You know, you get away with things because you’re physically talented, and you just have more permissions and are more immune to consequences than others because a lot of people want to see you win.”
The larger implications of the NFL and its effect on young men have stuck with Rivera. “I thought a lot about the safety measures that the NFL is trying to take,” he says. “Obviously, the conversation about head injuries and CTE has bled into the mainstream…. It’s not rocket science to think [that] when you’re getting your head hit very often, something is going to happen.” Rivera notes the NFL’s push to mitigate the potential damage of CTE by implementing new rules and policies around how players can tackle each other—and the public outcry that has occurred as a result.
“I know that a lot of people are really upset about that because they think that it changes, like, the spirit of the game to not be able to tackle in order to get somebody to the ground,” the actor says. “It’s interesting that it needs to be this amount of vicious in order to be the sport that we like.”
It took Rivera only a few takes before he realized that to do his best work onscreen, he couldn’t leave it all on the field. “Football hurts so much more than I remember,” says Rivera. “I wanted to be a hero when I first came in on set. I was like, ‘I’m going to do the football. I can play it. I used to be a baller myself.’ It took about two, three setups before I was like, ‘No more. I will not be hit again.’ It hurts, man.”
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