‘American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez’ to Dramatize Football Player’s Fall From Glory

The tragic life of the late football player and convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez will get the Ryan Murphy treatment this summer in FX’s new series, American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez. The 10-episode limited series premieres on Sept. 17.

A trailer for the show, for which Murphy is an executive producer, shows Hernandez, played by Josh Andrés Rivera, grappling with mental illness, struggling with his temper, the physical trauma from playing football, and, of course, brandishing a gun. Patrick Schwarzenegger plays Tim Tebow on the show, while Tammy Blanchard portrays Hernandez’s mom, Terri. And everyone in the clip seems caught up in the tension. It’s the type of trailer with a clock ticking in the background behind the scenes, and the ticking gets faster and faster as the underlying pitch raises, suggesting an explosive end.

“You don’t know the kind of thoughts I have,” Hernandez says in the trailer. “It’s like a demon.”

Interestingly, Murphy is not couching the story under his American Crime Story banner. The footballer joined the New England Patriots in 2010 as a tight end. He was arrested three years later and charged with the murder of his friend, Odin Lloyd. He died by suicide in prison in 2017. His death occurred two days after he was acquitted of a separate double-murder charge. Postmortem research revealed that Hernandez suffered from stage three CTE (head trauma often found in football players), which was considered severe.

According to Variety, Stu Zicherman developed the show based on the podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc. The series follows another about Hernandez, Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez, which premiered on Netflix in 2020.