Ryan Murphy returns with a new anthology series that explores the inner workings of one of America’s most sacred institutions through a tragic, true story. In the inaugural season of American Sports Story, Murphy delves into the rise and fall of Aaron Hernandez, the New England Patriots star who battled inner demons and was charged with multiple murders; he was convicted of one of them, the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd.
In a new episode of still looking hosts Hillary Busis, Richard Lawson, i Chris Murphy unpack the first two episodes of American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez and chat with Josh Rivera, that portrays Hernandez, about getting in shape as a professional athlete, and how doing the series changed his feelings about football.
In his review American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, Lawson calls the new series “a worthwhile examination of a killer’s motivations” and praises Rivera’s performance. “It is, in many ways, the role of a lifetime, an opportunity to explore the extremes of the human experience that Rivera seizes with controlled relish,” Lawson writes. In conversation with Busis, Rivera, who was part of the first national tour of Hamilton and starred Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story remakereveals that he actually played football in high school, though he gave it up as his passion for musical theater grew.
“I thought about it very seriously for a while,” he says of sticking with football. “It’s just a monumental time commitment that made it very difficult to do anything else, and at the time I was just starting to really devote myself to singing and acting. 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 take a little more seriously and it kind of conflicted with football.”
Getting back into shape was easier said than done for Rivera. He only had three months to transform his body into that of an NFL tight end after booking the role. “It was like you have to get as big as you can in April,” she says. With the help of a personal trainer, she was able to pack on the pounds. “I weighed 185 pounds, and I gained about 30 pounds, which was crazy,” Rivera continues. “I didn’t know that this was naturally possible. It was, like, five days a week in the gym, and I was just eating as much as I could eat.”
Even tougher than the physical toll was the mental toll of playing someone as notorious as Hernandez. Rivera shares that she was anxious about taking on the role and found the task at hand “very daunting at first.”
“I’m very motivated not to make a fool of myself,” says Rivera. “I don’t consider myself a controversial person. I don’t want anyone to be offended or insulted in any way… I want it to be truthful and ultimately my job is to take all the information I’m given and the resources available and draw – a picture of it”.