‘American Sports Story’ Boss on How He Made His Aaron Hernandez Series Watchable

[This story contains spoilers from the season finale of American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez.]

For Stu Zicherman, the biggest challenge when setting out to make American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez was figuring out how to make their lead character “relatable, watchable, empathetic — and then trying to string that through the entire season,” she showrunner tells The Hollywood Reporter.

“That was always the focus in the writers room,” he says. “It’s like, ‘How can we be true to the story, be true to all the other characters [but] also find ways to Aaron’s humanity that feel like it’s cascading out of control?”

Now that the true-crime series from Ryan Muprhy has released its finale, Zicherman is able to offer his assessment of the 10-episode FX limited series. And he says that giving people reason to keep watching was key.

“Once you get into the later part of the season with the murders and some of the awful, awful things he did, [the question becomes] ‘how can you ask an audience to come back every week and follow them? How do we see this through until the very end?’” he asks. “And if we could do it right, what you would get in the finale would be this feeling of ‘I know it’s coming, but I wish it wouldn’t happen.’ And I think we accomplished that.”

Fascination with Aaron Hernandez’s story began long before the FX series. In addition to The Boston Globe and Wondery 2018 podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc., which is the source material for the FX series, Oxygen had the two-part Aaron Hernandez: Uncovered, plus there was Aaron Hernandez: An ID Murder Mystery and Netflix’s Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez. None of them dramatized it all until Murphy and Brad Falchuk, the team behind The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, stepped in.

FX’s exploration into Hernandez’s story, as Zicherman alludes, was more than just “ripped from the headlines.” Instead, American Sports Story set out to examine the intersections with so many facets of American life. In addition to the obvious allure of the NFL and college football, Hernandez later being outed as bisexual brought sexuality, toxic masculinity, childhood trauma and more into play. And all those complexities were put on the capable shoulders of Josh Rivera who plays Hernandez.

“The emotional truth of this story is so complex,” says Zicherman. While there is a “big sports component,” he says there was even more at stake for him and his team as they sought “to be true to the complexities of Aaron’s story as we knew them, and give people answers to some of the questions they’ve always had about him. The biggest of which is: Why would someone with all that success do something like this?”

From the outside looking in, Hernandez had achieved the American dream. Born into a working-class family, to a Puerto Rican father Dennis and an Italian mother Terri, in Bristol, Connecticut, Hernandez grew up playing football alongside his older brother D.J., coached by their father who played college football. Despite reports of his father Dennis being abusive, Aaron was still devastated by his sudden death while he was in high school, especially since his father was the one who put the NFL tag on his back. Instead of going to the hometown University of Connecticut, the mighty UConn, Hernandez went to the University of Florida, helping the Gators secure a national championship in 2008 under Urban Meyer.

Because of Hernandez’s remarkable football talent, his bad behavior was overlooked, exempting him from any personal accountability during his formative college years. Although rumors of his misdeeds and poor emotional intelligence scores sank him low in the 2010 NFL draft, Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots still gave him a shot. Playing so near to home proved to not be best for him. Though he excelled on the football field, helping his team reach another Super Bowl and earning a $41-million contract, no one knew he was living a double life. That all came tumbling down in 2013 when he was arrested for the murder of Odin Lloyd, a semi-professional football player who was also the boyfriend of his future sister-in-law.

Not long after, Hernandez was charged with the murders of two other men and convicted to life in prison. During a legal appeal that was having notable success, Hernandez was found hanging from a sheet in his prison cell on April 19, 2017. His death was ruled a suicide, with some pointing to a radio show outing him as gay or bi-sexual as the impetus. At just age 27, he left behind his fiancée Shayanna Jenkins-Hernandez, their young daughter, Avielle, and many unanswered questions.

“Aaron always had a lot of secrets. But once he kills the guys in Boston, once he kills Odin, he’s carrying around so much [psychological] baggage, and is getting high more and more often to subjugate that baggage. And then you factor in the brain injury stuff, CTE, and you get obviously a different Aaron than the one in the pilot. But by series’ end, there’s still lots of traces of the original character we met,” says Zicherman.

“People who carry around that many secrets, at least some of them, can get very good at protecting them or be very stringent about protecting them. And Aaron was very chameleon-like with his ability to flip flop through different [situations] — he was one way with his teammates, another way with his mom, and another way with Shayanna, another way with Sherrod — and I think that he became very efficient or proficient at code-switching and I think that was his way of protecting his secrets,” he adds.

Recognizing that a lot of that code-switching is culturally based, Zicherman turned to his team to fill in the holes he could not. “When I work on shows or stories like this that have cultural elements that are not something I can relate to, I really rely heavily on the writing staff. And I did in this case to help me and help our staff understand what it would have been like for Aaron to be half-Latino and half-Italian growing up in this mostly white working-class neighborhood, and what that would have been like when he went to Florida [because] that was a very different kind of Latino person than he may have experienced in other places.

“And the same with the sports [because] I never was in a locker room. I’ve never played professional football or college football; I’m just a fan,” he continues. “So I relied on people who’ve been in locker rooms, people who’ve been on the field, who can speak to what it’s like to have your coach berate you in front of your whole team. I really tried to rely on people’s firsthand experience.”

Picking the right actors is also key. “Casting for me is always sort of a gut feeling,” says Zicherman. “You see someone, and you just feel like you know they can inhabit the part. I don’t always go for the ‘you’re doing a true story,’ you want to sort of live somewhere in the resemblance world, right? You want the characters to resemble a little bit, but I care less about that than someone sort of inhabiting the character and breathing life into it. Some of these characters don’t get a ton of screen time, so when they do, you want them to really bring a presence and bring energy and preparedness to the screen. I think we accomplished that with a lot of the characters.”

Zicherman says he always leaves an opening for actors to chime in. “I’m not a writer who writes something and, when it’s done, it’s done, and when it goes to set to be shot exactly the way I wrote it,” he explains. “For really important scenes, really important dialogue scenes, I like to be there for rehearsal and hear it out loud, and let the actors kind of weigh in, and hear some improv, and hear some choices, and keep trying things until I feel like we’ve got it right. I love to cast actors that come with ideas. And I think all these actors, every one of them, came with so many ideas. I love that because I always say it starts with what we write, but it becomes theirs too. It becomes their words so I really try to collaborate with them and get the best version of it that we all can get.”

Zicherman is especially appreciative of what Rivera brought to Aaron. The more they filmed, he says he realized “we had this incredible actor at the center of the show, and [we were] just trying to continue to adjust the scripts, to figure out ways for him to perform things, for him to inhabit certain elements of the character that we’d been thinking about but couldn’t find ways to sort of put to words, constantly putting Josh in a position to really sort of bring all the elements of Aaron Hernandez to a boil. And I remember thinking about the last episode, just about how we were going to bring back all these things that we introduced during the season, as well as sort of introduce the notion of remorse or regret, which, again, was always something that the real Aaron never did. The real Aaron never admitted to any crimes or that he did any of this. But, in listening to the prison tapes, you could hear regret in his voice, and I always really wanted to infuse that into the finale. And so [we were] just finding ways to put Josh into positions and into scenes and into moments that would really elevate the material.”

Portraying larger-than-life football luminaries like Belichick, Meyer and Tim Tebow, who was Aaron’s quarterback at Florida, wasn’t an issue for Zicherman. Instead, he was more interested in exploring bigger themes in Hernandez’s story like toxic masculinity. “In the early episodes as the University of Florida,” says Zicherman, they explore “being in that locker room to set up this world of toxic masculinity that Aaron was sort of born into. He’s born into this body which his father felt [meant] he could only be a football player. As a football player, you’re in locker rooms and you’re in a culture that has historically been very toxically masculine. And, for a person struggling with issues like his identity, that was not a safe place for him — that kind of toxic masculinity, which is rampant in sports, and that classic male dad image, coach image [to] ‘be a man, hit him like a man, don’t be a p-word, don’t be an f-word.’

“It’s just a never-ending stream of toxic masculinity that handcuffs someone like Aaron and traps him in the world, I think, because I’ve always said about the show that he was never given room or space to figure out who he was or what he was going to be as a person. And a lot that had to do with this world, this very toxic, masculine world.”

In the penultimate episode, Zicherman got to explore another important element of Hernandez’s life. “I really wanted to do an episode from the women’s perspective, and it worked out that episode nine was a great time to do it [since] Aaron’s first trial was not terribly dramatic [because] there was a lot of proof that he killed Lloyd,” he says. “What was really dramatic and interesting to me was the people left behind, especially people like Shayanna [Jaylen Barron], Terri [Tammy Blanchard]; these are the people who support him and they’re there for him, and [Shayanna] was there for him. She’s raising his baby, and there’s a certain life that the spouse of an athlete lives, and it’s a life or uncertainty.

“So I was really interested in the now that he’s gone off to prison, how they go on. It’s so hard for someone [like Shayanna], who had such high hopes of building something with Aaron. They had a history and a future she was very strong-minded about trying to build [a life]. And I think that she was terribly, terribly disappointed that, obviously, all went away.”

From the very beginning, Zicherman says the triangle between “Aaron, Terri and Tanya” was a central one. “Aaron, from the first episode from high school, felt so disappointed in his mother, and spent most of his life trying to figure out a way to have a relationship with her, but just couldn’t. They couldn’t find it. By all accounts, Terri was a narcissist, and she did what was best for her, and Aaron never felt safe or protected by her. Tanya [Lindsay Mendez], who he did feel safe with, listened to him [and] didn’t have an agenda for him like everybody else did. And I just really love that. I mean you can make an entire show out of that story. I wish we could have done more with it, but, again, it ends tragically with Tanya getting sick. That family had so much tragedy at the end of the day. We always thought that Tanya was the one who really saw and understood him, and Terry was always stuck in this world of what she wanted him to be, and that’s an interesting sort of gray area.”

The role CTE may have played in Hernandez’s life is prominent in the finale. With the concussion issues Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa has had this season and much of his career, the CTE conversation is very timely. Still, Zicherman had to be careful about how to incorporate this huge part from the podcast into the series. “We obviously didn’t want to blame Aaron becoming a murderer on CTE,” says Zicherman. “It was really important to us that we did not do that [because] there are other players with CTE that don’t become murderers, but there was no way to wrap up this story without talking about CTE and seeing Aaron’s brain weighed and studied because he had a very, very, very severe case of CTE, probably the worst case for anyone his age.”

As far as the series falling under the American Sports Story banner instead of American Crime Story, “that’s above my pay grade,” says Zicherman. “I remember when they first told me it was going to be an American Sports Story and they asked me to think about what are the ways that this story, a sports story, can speak to the larger themes of American culture. I think this story [about Aaron Hernandez] had all the elements of that fit the bill.”

Going into this, Zicherman knew that “Ryan [Murphy] shows get a lot of eyeballs.” And while he says, “I don’t follow audience reactions that much,” he is happy with the feedback he has received. “There’s so much people just didn’t know,” he says. “We based the show on really great specific research and I’m really happy that people watching it gained some insight into who [Aaron Hernandez] was while not forgiving him for what he did.”

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All episodes of American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez are now streaming on FX and Hulu.