Stuart Zicherman didn't intend to have "American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez" absolve the late NFL player of his crimes, chiefly, the fatal 2013 shooting of his friend, Odin Lloyd. "Aaron's guilty of murder. He ruined people's lives and families' lives. And he should never be forgiven for that," the creator of the recently released FX drama anthology told Salon. And yet, despite Hernandez's wrongdoings, Zicherman caveated that his case is somewhat of a cautionary tale, a lethal cocktail that saw Hernandez's consistent lack of guiding authority figures crash headlong with a franchise that often views players as "commodities."
With a lead performance by Josh Rivera of "West Side Story" and "The Hunger Games" prequel "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes," the ten-episode series — which also saw "American Horror Story"'s Ryan Murphy as an executive producer — traces Hernandez's life as a fledgling phenom from Bristol, Connecticut through his collegiate career at the University of Florida and subsequent professional role as a tight end for the New England Patriots. It ultimately concludes with Hernandez's death by suicide while incarcerated in 2017, which many have speculated to have been a result of a severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) — a degenerative brain disease found in many football players — and rumors about his sexuality.
While Zicherman did see space to indict the NFL and other people involved in Hernandez's life "a little bit," what he really wanted to explore in this iteration of "American Sports Story" was the immense pressure the athlete was under. "I think that he suffused a lot of his emotions and a lot of his fears. Being an NFL star brings all these things to a boil," Zicherman said.
Check out the full interview with Zicherman, in which he discusses dimensionalizing Hernandez, the player's immense paranoia, and "people and institutions" who may have healed a level of adjacent culpability.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What drew you to want to make a dramatized anthology series about Aaron Hernandez, and why now?
I'm a big football fan, and I knew the story, and I thought there wasn't that much more to tell. And then when the Boston Globe Spotlight team came out with their piece that was followed up by the podcast, they kind of re-broke the story and exposed certain elements of the story that I didn't know. And I figured if I didn't know, then the world didn't know. I always love telling a story that you think you know, but that you really don't know. And I thought that was a good reason to make the show, because it was so much more complex than it appeared. And Aaron was so much more complex than he appeared.
The why now is simply, I think that this story doesn't go away. Football and sports — especially football — have never been bigger in our country, and I think it's a good time to make a show that's both about this person, these crimes . . . But also this larger idea about sports in America, and how we raise our athletes up and turn them into heroes, and then the same way we tear them down when they do something terrible.
Watching the series, you really get a sense of Aaron as this multi-dimensional character. How important was it to you to challenge the broader, and now sort of solidified public opinion of who he was?
It was really important because I think that — I'm sorry, I'm just driving past a billboard of the show! It always gets me excited.
That's cool! Where are you, and where's the billboard?
Oh, I'm in LA. I think it's important because we tend to one-dimensionalize people and their stories. Aaron had sort of been one-dimensionalized: He was a monster, he was a murderer, he was a killer, and at the end of the day, no one's born a murderer. You're not born a killer. There are reasons, and there was a big story here about how Aaron became who he became, and why he became, right? So I think it's important to dimensionalize him and tell the complexity of the story without forgiving him for what he did. He did these horrible things, and I don't think the show forgives him, but it does sort of suggest that while he is responsible, there are other people and institutions that are somewhat culpable along the way.
Going off of that, we see that Aaron had a very fraught upbringing — his father was very abusive, and the other male figures in his life, notably his University of Florida coach Urban Meyer, were almost equally as icy. There are different striations of that, but can you speak about the role of those male figures in Aaron's life as they relate to his own construction of masculinity?
It's so much driven by his dad, and I think his dad was obviously abusive — verbally and physically abusive — but he was also very loving and caring, and really, really cared about Aaron and really wanted him to stay on the straight and narrow. That's why he wanted him to go to UConn — he wanted to keep an eye on him. I think that Aaron looked up to his dad. When he lost him, he hadn't sort of resolved any of the issues he had with his dad — he was so young — and what you end up with is someone who's constantly searching for an authority figure and someone to put a hand on his back and steer him in the right direction, or help him figure things out.
Unfortunately — I wouldn't say that Urban Meyer is icy as much as he is sort of driven to win, and not just win at UF, but also win Aaron in the recruiting race. And that sort of pressure of winning at all costs makes people like Urban Meyer do things like pull Aaron out of high school early when he probably wasn't ready, and bring him down to this Florida culture, and immerse him in the world of college football because he's such a great talent. I think Aaron spent a lot of his life looking for those authority figures and had any of them at any point taken him off the high-speed train he was on, things might have turned out differently.
Something I really noticed was this undercurrent of Aaron's paranoia and stress throughout the series. It notably starts in a club where he's worried about two guys who he thinks are cops, and then of course his concern over people knowing his sexuality, which is a seed planted early on by his father's homophobia, which kind of leads to his demise. Can you talk about how you approach trying to represent that internal turmoil?
It all starts with secrets. Aaron had so many secrets. I think that from the time he was a boy, and I think that over time, those secrets start to corrode a person. I think that he suffused a lot of his emotions and a lot of his fears. Being an NFL star brings all these things to a boil, all these different parts of Aaron, all these different elements to a boil.
He was very paranoid, especially by the time he got to the NFL, and that was for good reasons to be paranoid . . . but also all that drug use and the onset of what would be CTE and the pressure of all the lying and all that, it would make anyone paranoid.
Totally. I imagine Aaron, as complicated as he is, is an extremely difficult character to play, so what were you looking for during the casting process, and what made you ultimately settle on Josh Rivera?
This was one of the shows I was writing where I was like, 'Oh no. How am I ever going to find someone to play this part?'"
But Josh came in. Actually, Nina Jacobson, our producer, was shooting "Hunger Games" in Berlin with Josh, and she said, "I think I might have the guy." And he auditioned while he was shooting "Hunger Games." When I saw the audition, it was such a revelation because he wasn't just playing the darkness; he was playing the goofiness of Aaron, and he was playing the emotionality of Aaron, the complexity. Aaron wasn't — like I said before — he wasn't just a monster. He was actually a kid. He was a really likable kid. People liked him, and he had all these different side stems, and Josh was able to . . . I think there could be an inclination for an actor to come in and just play the darkness, but Josh played all of it. And most of all, he played the emotionality of it, which I found to be really compelling.
There are 10 episodes in the series, which is quite a few to tell this story. The first four kind of dive into everything that precedes Aaron's drafting in the NFL. Can you discuss your approach to structuring Aaron's story?
Yeah, I mean, some of it broke down into sort of clear parts, right? There was his childhood, there was being out of that childhood and into Florida and into big-time college football, at such a young age.
I always wanted to do an episode of the draft. The whole draft process, and the way they sort of make commodities of these people, almost like they're pieces of meat. They weigh them, and they probe them, and they measure them, and they put them through tests, and all this stuff. And the pressure on your personality — they want to know everything about your background, they want to know everything about who you are. They're going to find everything out, you know? I always wanted to do a draft episode, so we got to do that. Then you have your Patriots episodes, which is where things really began to sort of downward spiral.
I didn't think that the trials were that interesting — the murder trials — because it was kind of obvious that he'd killed Odin Lloyd. He almost didn't try to hide it. So, I really wanted to do an episode from the women's perspective, episode 9, about the people left behind. And then I really wanted to do an episode in jail, where Aaron tried to reckon with what he'd done, and that was episode 10. So, yeah, it kind of broke down in a neat way.
You just alluded to this, but in the fourth episode, we get a peek at the NFL Scouting Combine. In one scene, a Black player turns to another Black player and says, "Now I know why they call this s**t a slave auction." How much, if at all, did you intend to interrogate football and the NFL as a cultural institution in making this series?
Well, I mean, listen — I'm a big football fan, so it's like, I don't want to condemn the NFL. But I also think the NFL does treat these players a bit like commodities. And I think you have to sort of indict the NFL a little bit. Again, you can't blame them for what happened to Aaron, obviously; but the Scouting Combine is objectively kind of ridiculous: Lining people up and weighing them in front of a crowd. As it was described to me by former players, it's literally like, you stand up there in front of a bunch of white guys with pens and pads measuring and making notes about you. It's a very odd and complicated thing. And I think that for me, it was less about the NFL and more about the pressure on Aaron. You've built this whole thing — your whole life, like how you get to that, how you get through that thing and get to live your dream of getting drafted.
After Aaron died by suicide, he was posthumously diagnosed with a really severe case of CTE. Injuries in football are no new phenomenon. In 2023, we saw Damar Hamlin's televised cardiac arrest during a Bill-Bengals game. And then this past summer, the deaths of numerous high school and middle school football players renewed calls for greater safety precautions. Did you consult any medical experts in creating this series?
I did talk to a head injury specialist. But the Boston Globe had done such a thorough job of investigating this story. And I was able to rely on a lot of the reports that they got from Dr. [Ann] McKee at Boston University — the woman who actually did get to study Aaron's brain. So they've done a very, very thorough examination of it. And it was important to me, listen — we definitely don't want to suggest that CTE is what turned Aaron into a murderer because there are many, many people who have CTE and don't murder anyone. But it was impossible for us to tell the story without some . . . you can't tell Aaron's story without at least telling some part of the brain injury story.
If there's one thing that you hope viewers take away from the series about Aaron and about football writ large, what would it be?
I just want people to understand the larger scope and complexity of the story. Like I said before, Aaron's guilty of murder. He ruined people's lives and families' lives. And he should never be forgiven for that. But I also think there are lessons to be taken away from this. The suggestion that we as fans love these games, and we love to watch guys crush each other — and there's fallout from that. And there's pressure on that. Football's about a game — how do these guys turn it off when they come off the field? I think it's just important for people to remember that.
If you are in crisis, please call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.
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