Aaron Hernandez played his first-ever NFL game for the New England Patriots more than a decade ago on September 12, 2010, against the Cincinnati Bengals. The following week, the 20-year-old former Florida Gators star, who helped his team win a national championship the year before, threw six receptions for 101 receiving yards and put the league on notice. Three years later, just a year after he played in the Super Bowl and signed a $40 million contract extension, police escorted the NFL star from his mansion in handcuffs for the murder of a former friend Odin Lloyd. Shortly after, he was linked to a double murder and several others. On April 19, 2017, just seven years after his NFL debut, he was found hanging from a bedsheet in his cell. It was a suicide that was reportedly motivated by a radio show in which he was outed as gay.

When you combine those details with courtroom footage and voice messages, it’s no wonder Oxygen aired the two-part series Aaron Hernandez RevealedAnd The Boston Globe and Wondery quit the podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc. just a year after his death. Two more docuseries — Aaron Hernandez: An ID Murder Mystery And Killer Inside: The Ghost of Aaron Hernandez from Netflix —disappeared in 2020. And now there’s American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandezthe first part of a new anthology series from Ryan Murphy and his team of American crime story for FX.

Created by Stuart “Stu” Zicherman, whose credits include The Americans And The affair, American sports storygrounded by The Boston Globe‘s extensive coverage in their own backyard together with their Gladiator podcast, which likely takes some of its cues from 2016 The People vs. OJ Simpson: American Crime Storybut with a deeper, internal lens. What they discovered surprised even the creator/showrunner.

“I’m a big football fan, and I thought I knew this story,” Zicherman says The Hollywood Reporter“When I read The Boston Globe spotlight piece and then (listening to) the podcast that followed, I realized there was so much more here that I didn’t know. And I always like to tell stories that an audience thinks they know and then shed new light on them.”

Zicherman emphasizes that Hernandez’s story “isn’t as one-dimensional as people think. I always had this idea that Aaron was a monster, right? He was a murderer, a killer, a monster. And when you delve into something like that, you’re reminded that no one is born a murderer. You’re not born a monster, and so you really start to look at why and how. I think we wanted to not forgive him for what he did, but at the same time show the world that there’s a bigger thing going on here, right? There are institutions and people along the way, for athletes, that don’t necessarily see them as people. They’re items, they’re vessels. And so we tried to approach it with the complexity that I think was really there.”

Exploring that complexity over 10 episodes was a delicate process. “I tried to put together a writing team with a lot of different perspectives on the story, with very different backgrounds, different orientations.[I]even brought in a former NFL player and gave him his first writing assignment,” 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. We took 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 affected the story.”

Getting to the core theme was a little trickier, but they settled on authenticity. “I’m not a football player,” Zicherman explains, “but authenticity is something that I can relate to, that everyone can relate to. We’re all trying to figure out who we are at some point in our lives, and most of us are given a little bit of space and freedom to find that. Aaron wasn’t because of the body he was born into, and the world he was born into. And I felt like that was such an emotional place to start.”

It wasn’t easy finding someone who could embody the many different sides of Hernandez — from his troubled home life in Bristol, Connecticut, to the unexpected loss of his father, who was both strict and abusive as a teenager, to being in the college sports world and later the NFL, all the while grappling with society’s toxic expectations of masculinity that worked against his same-sex attraction.

“I had a little bit of a panic,” Zicherman admits. “When you’re 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 this guy?’ You’re like, ‘I need someone who looks like a football player, but who has a lot of emotion and complexity.’”

Zicherman and his team discovered that in Josh Rivera, who some may know from 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 into this particular role to play the darkness, to play the violence, to play the tough guy. It’s much 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 approach that vulnerability in a very unique way,” Zicherman says.

Like Hernandez, Rivera also has a Puerto Rican background and even played a little football in high school. But those coincidences weren’t Rivera’s ticket to Hernandez. “I was trying to play on the foundation that a lot of his friends and family had about him — that he was a nice person. He was good-natured. He was charismatic,” Rivera says. THR. “I think that’s the part that’s really interesting: How is this person able to do all that? I tried to use that perspective as a base and then use certain traumatic events or situations or circumstances to add these layers that make it a little more complex until you end up not really recognizing the person from the first episode anymore.”

Rivera paid special attention to Hernandez’s internal turmoil and his environment, which is immediately addressed in the first episode of American crime storyViewers are introduced to Hernandez’s dual identities as early scenes go from him at a strip club, paranoid about spotting boys he mistakes for cops, as Ciara’s “Ride” plays, to him gunning down his friend at point-blank range in his SUV and then accepting an award as a role model for the youth. But the bulk of that episode finds a younger Aaron Hernandez trying to live up to his father’s early expectations that he’d play in the NFL, while also grappling with his sexuality.

“I tried to start from a position of someone who has this perpetual imposter syndrome and is battling that,” Rivera says. “His upbringing was really rocky and his relationship with masculinity was really rocky. I had these little anchors[of him]trying to be the best, trying to fit in, having this complicated relationship with his identity. I had these little things that I was trying to pull from, all centered around this core essence of someone who is really just a boy trying to be a man or trying to come across as a guy who’s tough and has his shit together.”

By the end of episode two, it’s crystal clear that Hernandez has juggled far 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 heinous crimes, and make people care enough to think about why. When it comes to Jeffrey Dahmer and other white men, these kinds of television treatments are not unusual. But there are extra layers when it comes to doing the same thing to a person of color. As heinous and unforgivable as Hernandez’s crimes against his victims are, he has also betrayed the American dream that is sold to many people of color: He rose to the top and blew it.

“It’s an interesting tightrope to walk,” Rivera says. “Because I think, unfortunately, on a broad mainstream level, people are less likely to be empathetic in situations involving people of color (but) it also doesn’t change the crime. So it’s hard because you don’t want to romanticize it.”

In a country where race and socioeconomic status still play a significant role, it’s groundbreaking to have a limited series of this magnitude that delves deeper into who the person in the headline is or has become.

“It’s a profound thing to approach and be able to explain and not explain to forgive. It’s just the context that I think makes the story so much more interesting,” Rivera says. “But that being said, you can’t just let anyone off the hook.”

American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez releases new episodes every Tuesday at 10pm ET on FX and Hulu.