American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, out on FX Sept. 17 and produced by Ryan Murphy, attempts to dramatize the real life descent of Aaron Hernandez from NFL star to convicted murderer.
In 2013, 10 months after Hernandez signed a $40 million contract with the New England Patriots, he was arrested and charged with murdering Odin Lloyd, the boyfriend of his fiancée’s sister. He was convicted in 2015, and two years later, found dead in his prison cell after hanging himself with a bedsheet. He was 27.
The tragedy is an obvious subject for Murphy, known for his lurid dramas and docu-series about high-profile crimes like American Crime Story and Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. This latest FX series is a dramatization of a podcast, Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc., in which Boston Globe journalists chronicled his rise and fall. A separate 2020 Netflix documentary, The Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez, also examined Hernandez’s life.
Murphy’s 10-episode scripted series picks up from those previous efforts and depicts Hernandez (played by Josh Rivera) as a trouble athlete who fumbled relationships because of drug and alcohol abuse, and who was fueled by frustrations stemming from a troubled home life and fears of revealing his true sexuality.
How American Sports Story portrays Aaron Hernandez’s sexuality
In the show, Hernandez has a fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins (Jaylen Barron), and a newborn daughter, but is a closeted gay man. Flashbacks show him as a high school football player masturbating to gay porn. The Gladiator podcast revealed that Hernandez’s father Dennis was very homophobic, and frequently using slurs for gay men. Thus, American Sports Story depicts Hernandez’s guilt about his sexuality—at one point he zones out during a NFL draft interview while imaging his father saying “faggot” over and over again.
In the series, Hernandez both hooks up with men in bathroom stalls at the University of Florida—where he was considered the best tight end in U.S. college football—while asking his evangelical Christian teammate, Tim Tebow (Patrick Schwarzenegger), for advice on how to change himself.
Later, Hernandez is seen with Dennis Sansoucie (Kalama Epstein), who in real life claims he had an on-again-off-again relationship with Hernandez. In the show, the two jet off to Mexico for a romantic getaway while Shayanna is left behind in Boston.
Aaron Hernandez’s brain
In the wake of Lloyd’s murder, there’s been speculation about whether a traumatic brain injury had anything to do with Hernandez’s actions. Researchers at Boston University (BU) who studied Hernandez’s brain after his death observed a severe case of the traumatic brain injury known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). In fact, it was the worst case of CTE the BU researchers had seen in a young person. Hernandez played tackle football since the age of 8, and he suffered two documented concussions—one in high school and one while playing for the Patriots.
“It’s impossible for me to look at the severity of CTE in Mr. Hernandez’s brain and not think that that had a profound effect on his behavior,” neurologist Sam Gandy, who looked at brain scans, says on the Gladiator podcast. However, BU neurologist Bob Cantu points out that while impulsivity is a hallmark of CTE, authorities said the Lloyd murder was planned. Overall, of all of the brains that the BU researchers examined, “not one of those brains with the exception of Aaron were involved with homicide, to my knowledge,” Cantu says on the Gladiator podcast. “They all have CTE. So I think I’ll just leave it at that.”
The podcast also suggests Hernandez’s erratic behavior is related to drug use. The motive for the Lloyd killing is not clear, but according to prosecutors, Hernandez didn’t like some men that Lloyd was talking to and thought they were trash-talking him.
American Sports Story also makes clear the role of Hernandez’s troubled upbringing in his violent personality. The Gladiator podcast describes routine physical abuse in his home in Bristol, Connecticut. His father was a star athlete in high school nicknamed “The King,” but he never fulfilled his ambitions, and instead worked as a janitor. In the series, he takes out his frustrations on Aaron and his brother D.J., yelling and chasing them around the house.
The series also emphasizes Hernandez’s immaturity. He graduated high school early to play college football and left college early to play for the New England Patriots. In a foreshadowing comment about Hernandez, Florida coach Urban Meyer (Tony Yazbeck) says “that kid’s going to end up in the hall of fame—or prison.”
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