‘American Sports Story’: Josh Rivera on the Anxiety and Pain Behind Aaron Hernandez
Ryan Murphy is back with a new anthology series that explores the inner workings of one of America’s most sacred institutions through a tragic and true story. In the first 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 accused of multiple murders; he was convicted of one of them, the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd.
In a new episode of Still watching, host Hillary Busis, Richard Lawson, And Chris Murphy unzip the first two volumes of US Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez and chat with Josh Rivera, Hernandez, who plays the role of Hernandez, on achieving the physique of a professional athlete—and how making the film changed his feelings about soccer.
In his review US Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, Lawson called the new series “a worthy examination of a killer’s motives” and praised Rivera’s performance. “In many ways, this is the role of a lifetime, an opportunity to explore the extremes of human experience that Rivera captures with controlled relish,” Lawson wrote. In a conversation with Busis, Rivera, who is in the first national tour of Hamilton and starred in Steven Spielberg‘S West Side Story redorevealed that he actually played football in high school, although he gave it up as his passion for musical theater grew.
“I thought about it seriously for a little while,” he said of sticking with football. “It was just a huge time commitment that made it really difficult to do anything else, and at that point, I started really enjoying singing and performing. I performed in front of an audience for the first time, like, my sophomore year of high school…. That’s what I started pursuing a little more seriously, and it just conflicted a little bit with football.”
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 player after landing the role. “Like, you have to be as big as you can be by April,” he says. With the help of a personal trainer, he was able to gain weight. “I was 185 pounds, and I gained about 30 pounds, which is crazy,” Rivera continues. “I didn’t know that could happen naturally. Like, five days a week in the gym, and I just ate as much as I could.”
Even more difficult than the physical pain was the mental anguish of playing someone as notorious as Hernandez. Rivera shared that he was nervous 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,” Rivera said. “I don’t consider myself controversial. I don’t want anyone to be offended or offended in any way…. I want everything to be honest, and at the end of the day, my job is to take all the information that I’m given and the resources that are available to me and paint a picture with that information.”
