Note: The following story contains spoilers from “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez” Episode 10.
When Josh Rivera first got the script for the last episode of “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez,” he knew he had something special.
“I said to Stu [Zicherman] several times after I read the final episode, I was like, ‘This is the big monologue,’” Rivera told TheWrap.
That monologue comes towards the back half of “Who Killed Aaron Hernandez?” Set after the murder of Odin Lloyd, the episode follows Aaron (Rivera) in prison. It’s an installment that sees Aaron at his most hopeless. After losing his case, he’s charged with life in prison without a possibility of parole. This athlete, who was once hailed as a celebrity on and off the field, is left alone in a jail cell without even the support of his mother. And it’s all due to his own actions.
Desperate for relief, Aaron takes some drugs from a former inmate. Instead of the disturbing drawings written in blood and references to the Illuminati that were found in the real Hernandez’s jail cell after his suicide, “American Sports Story” imagines a more intimate, touching scene for Aaron’s final moments of life. While high, Aaron hallucinates having a conversation with the one person many said meant the most to him: his late father.
“There are a lot of things in all of our lives that are really informative to our identities. I couldn’t speak to the reality of it, but at least in this narrative the father — his treatment of Aaron and his passing — was massively informative,” Rivera said. “It seems like a fitting way to lay everything out on the table before we say goodbye to the character.”
Up until this point, Rivera plays Aaron as a man riddled with secrets. From his sexuality and drug problems to the crimes he hides from his fiancée and family, he’s a character so deft at lying to himself and others that the truth feels difficult to determine.
“It’s such a thing that’s present throughout the series. The way that I relate to it, there are tiny little things that people are in denial of all the time, myself included. Maybe it’s physical tics or vibes you bring to the group that maybe you aren’t aware of,” Rivera said. “We have this mechanism in us as human beings to have this established sense of identity, and anything that conflicts with that totally shatters our illusion of who we are. I tried to bring that to the character as much as possible.”
But for this scene, the actor tried to set Aaron’s well-worn mask aside and approach the character outside of his artifice of lies. Rivera described the scene as Aaron looking at himself “almost in third person.”
“Josh and I talked a lot about how Aaron was so proficient at keeping secrets,” series developer Stu Zicherman told TheWrap. “He could disconnect and disassociate from things. And he really believed in some way he didn’t do it, but that was what we were trying to reconcile at the end. What if he had to actually look in the mirror and consider that he did do this and express some regret?”
Zicherman originally conceived a different ending to the series than the one that aired, which he jokingly refers to as “Ghost Dad.” But once he saw Rivera’s performance, he rewrote the scene to “give certain liberties or freedoms to the actor.”
“I love the whole second part. I kept rewriting it for Josh,” Zicherman said, referring to the moment where Aaron begins to laugh with his father. But as the scene progresses, that laughter fades into sorrow as he starts to cry, presumably because he’s realized what he’s done. “That transformation literally takes place in the scene. I don’t think many actors can do the scene we did.”
“I felt very protected by everybody. That’s really what I can say about it. It was a great fitting end and a lot of work,” Rivera said.
All episodes of “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez” are available to stream on Hulu.
