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Aaron Hernandez played his very first game in the NFL for the New England Patriots over a decade ago on Sept. 12, 2010, against the Cincinnati Bengals. The next week, the 20-year-old former Florida Gators star, who helped his team win a national championship the year before, balled out with six receptions and 101 receiving yards and put the league on notice. Three years later, a mere year after playing in the Super Bowl and signing a $40 million contract extension, police escorted the NFL star out of his mansion in handcuffs for the murder of one-time friend Odin Lloyd. Soon after, he was linked to a double murder and implicated in a few more. On April 19, 2017, just seven years after his NFL debut, he was found dead, hanging from a bedsheet, in his prison cell in an apparent suicide reportedly prompted by a radio show outing him as gay.
"I am a big football fan, and I thought I knew this story," Zicherman tells The Hollywood Reporter. "When I read The Boston Globe spotlight piece and then [listened to] the subsequent podcast, I realized that there was so much more here that I didn't know. And I always love to tell stories that an audience thinks they know, and then shine new light on it."
Zicherman insists Hernandez's story "isn't as one-dimensional as people think. I'd always just been fed this idea that Aaron was a monster, right? He was a murderer, a killer, a monster. And when you start to get into something like this, you're reminded no one's born a murderer. You're not born a monster, and so you start to really look at why and how. I think what we tried to do was not forgive him for what he's done, but at the same time, show the world that there is a larger thing at play here, right? There are institutions and people along the way, for athletes, that don't necessarily look at them as people. They're items, they are vessels. And so we tried to approach it with the complexity that I think was actually really there."
Exploring that complexity over 10 episodes was a delicate process. "I tried to put together a writing staff that had a lot of different views on the story, that had very different backgrounds, different orientations. [I] even brought in a former NFL player and gave him his first writing job," Zicherman explains.
His approach, he continues, was to "take every part of Hernandez and look at it deeply in the writers room. Aaron was always described as a chameleon. He had all these different personalities and parts to him. We took [on] big themes and big ideas -- violence, drug use, abuse, sexuality -- all these different things, and we really tried to explore them, talk about them and figure out how they impacted the story."
Getting to the core theme was a bit trickier, but they landed on authenticity. "I'm not a football player," explains Zicherman, "but authenticity is something that I can relate to, anyone can relate to. All of us at some points of our lives are trying to figure out who we are, and most of us are given a little latitude and liberty to find that. Aaron was not because of the body he was born into, and the world he was born into. And I thought that was such an emotional place to start from."
It was not easy finding someone who could embody the many different sides of Hernandez -- from his troubled home life growing up in Bristol, Connecticut, to unexpectedly losing his father, who was both grounding and abusive as a teenager, to being plugged into the college sports machine and later the NFL, while struggling with society toxic masculinity expectations that countered his attraction to the same sex.
"I had a minor panic," Zicherman admits. "Writing a show like this, you're always a little bit afraid that you're never going to find the right actor to play it, because 'who is that guy?' You're thinking, 'I need somebody who's looks like a football player but has tons of emotion and complexity.'"
Zicherman and his team found that in Josh Rivera, who may be familiar to some for his roles as Chino in West Side Story and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. "I think it's easier for actors coming to this particular part to play the darkness, play the violence, to play the tough guy. It's a lot harder for people in auditions to play the other side of it, the emotionality of it and the vulnerability. And Josh is just able to access that vulnerability in a very unique way," says Zicherman.
Like Hernandez, Rivera also has Puerto Rican heritage and even played a little football in high school. But those coincidences weren't Rivera's entry point to Hernandez. "Initially, the foundation I tried to use was the accounts that a lot of his friends and family had of him -- that he was a sweet individual. He was good humored. He was charismatic," Rivera tells THR. "I think that's the part that's really interesting: how is this same person capable of all that? I tried to use that perspective as his foundation and then use certain traumatic events, situations or circumstances to add on these layers that make it a little bit more complex until eventually you don't really recognize the person from the first episode anymore."
Rivera paid special attention to Hernandez's internal turmoil as well as his environment. That turmoil is established immediately in the first episode of American Crime Story. Viewers are introduced to Hernandez's dual identities as early scenes move from him in the strip club paranoid over spotting guys he believes are cops, as Ciara's "Ride" plays, to him shooting his friend point blank in his SUV and then accepting an award as a role model for the youth. But the bulk of that episode shows the younger Aaron Hernandez trying to live up to his father's very early expectations of him playing in the NFL while also grappling with his sexuality.
"I tried to start from a place of basically somebody with perpetual imposter syndrome that's fighting against that," Rivera says. "His upbringing was very rocky, and his relationship to masculinity was very rocky. I sort of had these little anchors [of him] needing to be the best, wanting to fit in, having a complicated relationship with his identity. I had these little things that I tried to pull from all centered around this core essence of somebody who's really just a boy who's trying to be a man or trying to appear like a man who is tough and has this stuff together."
By the end of episode two, it's crystal clear that Hernandez juggled a lot more than anyone could have imagined. But it's also clear that American Crime Story has done something extraordinary. And that is: present a complex portrait of a man of color, a Latino man, who committed horrific crimes, and make people care enough to ponder why. When it comes to Jeffrey Dahmer and other white men, these television treatments aren't unusual. But there are added layers when it comes to doing the same for a person of color. As horrific and unforgivable as Hernandez's crimes are against his victims, he also betrayed the American dream that is sold to many people of color: he got to the top and blew it.
"It's an interesting tightrope to walk," says Rivera. "Because I do think that, unfortunately, on a widespread mainstream level, people are less inclined to lead with empathy in situations that involve people of color [but] also, it doesn't change the crime. So it's difficult because you don't want to romanticize this thing."
In a country where race and socioeconomic status continue to loom large, to have a limited series of this magnitude that digs more internally into who the person in the headline is or came to be is groundbreaking.
"It is a profound thing to approach and to be able to explain and not explain to forgive. It's just context that I think makes the story that much more interesting," Rivera says. "But then that being said, you can't let anybody off the hook."