Aaron Hernandez’s journey from NFL pro to convicted murderer gets the scripted TV treatment in the latest installment of Ryan Murphy‘s American Story franchise, American Sports Story, the trailer for which debuted Wednesday.
In the series, which premieres on FX on Sept. 17, Josh Andrés Rivera stars as Hernandez, who is tormented by his violent urges. “You don’t know what kind of thoughts I have. It’s like a demon,” he says. “What if God made me this way?”
Various people around the athlete warn him about his uncontrollable urges as someone who is now in the public eye. “You can’t make mistakes, Aaron,” he’s told by a family member. He’s also warned, “The drugs, the sex, the anger — nobody’s questioning your athletic ability, Aaron. They’re questioning your character.”
Besides Rivera, the series stars Patrick Schwarzenegger as Tim Tebow and Norbert Leo Butz as New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. It’s executive produced by Ryan Murphy, Stuart Zicherman, Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, Alexis Martin Woodall, Eric Kovtun, Scott Robertson and Carl Franklin. Based on the podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc., from The Boston Globe and Wondery, the inaugural installment of the new anthology series is also executive produced by Wondery’s Hernan Lopez and Marshall Lewy and The Boston Globe‘s Linda Pizzuti Henry and Ira Napoliello.
American Sports Story, announced in 2021, aims to reexamine a prominent event involving a sports figure through the prism of today’s world and will tell the story from multiple perspectives.
Hernandez was convicted of murder, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, in the 2023 shooting of fellow football player Odin Lloyd, the boyfriend of Hernandez’s fiancée’s sister. He was also tried but acquitted of the 2012 fatal shootings of Safiro Furtado and Daniel de Abreu.
Hernandez was ultimately acquitted from the murders of Furtado and de Abreu following a 2017 trial. But just days after the acquittal, Hernandez committed suicide when he was found to have hanged himself in his prison cell. It became one of the most notorious moments in NFL history.
