Josh Rivera Takes the Lead in American Sports Story

I’m trying to slim down now, ” says Josh Rivera half-jokingly. “Hollywood loves the lean boys. Timmy Chalamet is working his butt off.” We’re at the rock-climbing gym Brooklyn Boulders in Long Island City on a July afternoon. Rivera, who packed on nearly 30 pounds of muscle to play Aaron Hernandez, the late star Patriots tight end who was convicted of murder, bulges out of his loose cutoff beige shirt and gray shorts.

Rivera was 24 years old and working as a principal standby for the touring version of Hamilton when he sent in a tape for Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story. He was cast as Chino, Maria’s (Rachel Zegler) family-approved boyfriend. “I was like, ‘Tight, I made it.’ Like, ‘I’m Hollywood now … smooth sailing,’” he says.

The feeling didn’t last. Not long after production for West Side Story wrapped in 2019, the pandemic hit. At the time, he was in the middle of a workshop for the musical version of The Outsiders, which shut down. It was a sobering experience. As West Side Story was attracting Oscar buzz in 2021, he was working as a barback at a midtown restaurant: “I remember people being like, ‘Hey, are you that guy?’” Embarrassed, he would reply “no.”

After supporting parts in The Hunger Games prequel and the film adaptation of Cat Person, he has worked his way back with his first leading role in American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez. Part of the Ryan Murphy American Story franchise and adapted from a Boston Globe and Wondery podcast, American Sports Story is a moody, subdued portrait of the Pro Bowl star. The Puerto Rican, Italian American athlete had a five-year, $40 million contract when he was arrested amid dramatic media glare. Tried in two separate murder cases, he was convicted of murdering the boyfriend of his fiancée’s sister, then acquitted on charges of shooting two men in a car near a Boston nightclub. After he killed himself in prison in 2017 at age 27, rumors of affairs with men emerged, and his story turned into a tabloid mystery.

The show goes behind the scenes and into Hernandez’s background to depict his descent, sparked by brain trauma, celebrity insulation, and paranoia around his sexuality. “The thing that was really interesting food for thought is what celebrity and getting money really young can do,” says Rivera. His own profile now involves a relationship with his West Side Story co-star Zegler — the public nature of which he finds “pretty weird. I’m certainly not used to it. I have historically had the luxury of being able to hide behind my castmates who played a larger role than I did.” He pauses. “Now I can’t, right?”

Rivera’s parents, Puerto Rican chemists, moved to the continental U.S. in the mid-’80s and ended up in North Carolina. When he was a year old, they split up and he moved with his mother to Connecticut, then to Boulder, Colorado. In high school, he joined a band with a group of five friends, playing covers such as Elton John’s “Your Song” and Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” A teacher cast him as Marius in Les Miserables. “That was kind of the start,” he says, of musical theater’s presence in his life. His original plan after high school was to study musical composition at Berklee College of Music. But he couldn’t afford Berklee, so he ended up at Ithaca College, where he was surrounded by serious theater students. “We did a lot of the typical theater ‘pretend to be animals’ and stuff like that,” he says. Mostly he learned about “just being comfortable in front of an audience.” Senior students got to perform a theater piece at a showcase in New York, which was how he found his agent.

American Sports Story follows Hernandez from childhood to his death in prison. The show moves between his personal struggles and successes — the haunting death of his father, his conflicted sexual and romantic relationships with men, his triumphs in the football world — and the two murder trials. Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson, producing partners who collaborated on 2016’s The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story, developed the show. They were also producers of the Hunger Games franchise, and Jacobson was on set in Europe with Rivera as she was casting the Hernandez series. Rivera had played high-school football, and, as Simpson explains, it’s always hard “trying to cast people who are credible as athletes, given they are so unlike the rest of us, generally speaking.”

Rivera knew the broad outlines of the story. “I had heard about him, but I just thought what basically everybody else did who was vaguely familiar with the case, which is just like, Oh, this is a professional NFL player who killed civilians; that’s crazy,” he says. “I didn’t know about a lot of the childhood stuff.” Per Jacobson’s suggestion, he watched a Netflix documentary — in which a purported male sexual partner of Hernandez’s spoke out — and listened to the podcast the show is based on, which fleshes out his relationship with a physically abusive, homophobic father and explains how he was shaped by the football industry’s protection of valuable players. “The more I found out about it, the more I was like, Oh no, man, I care now,” he says. “Now I want it.”

Rivera first auditioned for Jacobson and later read with Patrick Schwarzenegger, who plays Tim Tebow. Simpson points to Hernandez’s layers; he was outwardly warm and goofy, even as inner turmoil churned. “Josh had both the charm and the warmth and the ability to empathize with him, but then the range to take this character where he needed to go,” Simpson says.

In the show, we see a Hernandez coddled and protected from consequences at the University of Florida and slowly splitting into separate spheres after the Patriots signing: a corporate-friendly family life with his fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins (Jaylen Barron), and their daughter, versus a rougher world of friends and hangers-on, like Alexander Bradley (Roland Buck III), who claimed Hernandez shot him between the eyes one night.

Rivera watched YouTube videos of Hernandez and noticed how he code-switched depending on which circle he was in, showing different parts of himself but hiding his pain with amiability. “When I get uncomfortable, I smile a lot,” Rivera says. “But that’s just like a mechanism that I use, which I think was used a lot by him.”

The show’s hair and makeup artists helped Rivera physically transform as well; they made his nose more severe with a prosthetic bridge, and he endured a “medieval” three-hour process as they applied Hernandez’s tattoos to his body, his arms hanging from slings attached to the ceiling to make sure none of them rubbed off.

By playing a real-life protagonist who many, including his own defense attorney, believe was closeted, the actor is walking right into questions about queer representation. Darren Criss, a straight actor, won an Emmy for his portrayal of gay serial killer Andrew Cunanan in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. After complaints about his playing prominent gay roles, Criss announced in 2018 that he would no longer take on those parts.

Rivera doesn’t think he’s in quite the same situation because, he says, Hernandez “wasn’t out; he identified as a straight man until he died.” He adds that he wouldn’t have auditioned for a show about an out gay man whose “story had to do with being proud about their sexual identity.” Still, he says he feels “a lot of fear with stuff like that — to take a stance in any way in the midst of potential public scrutiny.” He has watched Zegler face the surveillance that comes with fame. “I have a lot of respect for her because she stands up a lot for what she believes in,” he says. “I don’t trust the general public with my opinions because, I think, regardless of what a person says, it can be taken however anybody really wants it.”

Maintaining his privacy, of course, will get harder if he keeps booking bigger roles: “I feel like that’s sort of gonna have to change, right?” He’s preparing for leaner times just in case. He lives alone in Jersey City and is learning video-game development and C# coding. “I don’t know,” he says, smiling. “We’ll see.”