In his review of American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, Lawson calls the new series “a valuable examination of a killer’s motives” and praises Rivera’s performance. “It is in many ways the role of a lifetime, a chance to explore the extremes of the human experience that Rivera seizes with controlled enthusiasm,” Lawson writes. Speaking to Busis, Rivera, who was part of the first national tour of Hamilton and played in Steven Spielberg‘S West Side Story remake, it turns out that he actually played American football in high school, but stopped when 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 really hard to do anything else, and that’s when I really started to love singing and performing. I first performed in front of an audience my sophomore year of high school… It was something that I started to take a little bit more seriously, and it just kind of clashed with football.”

For Rivera, getting back in shape was easier said than done. He had just three months to transform his body into that of an NFL star tight end after landing the role. “It was just, you just have to get as big as you can for April,” he says. With the help of a personal trainer, he was able to pack on the pounds. “I was 185 pounds and I gained about 30 pounds, which was insane,” Rivera continues. “I didn’t know that was possible naturally. It was, like, five days a week in the gym and just eating as much as I could.”

Even greater than the physical toll was the mental toll of playing someone as notorious as Hernandez. Rivera says he was scared to take on the role and found the task ahead of him “very daunting at first.”

“I’m very motivated by not making a fool of myself,” Rivera says. “I don’t consider myself a controversial person. I don’t want anyone to be offended or offended in any way… I want it to be fair and ultimately my job is to take all the information that I’m given and the resources that are available and paint a picture.”