Josh Rivera on Finding Balance Between His Character’s Humanity & Horrors

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, Season 1, Episode 9, “What’s Left Behind.”]

American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez finally saw the consequences of the footballer’s actions come back to haunt him as FX‘s drama explored the former Patriots star’s arrest in 2013.

The installment, “What’s Left Behind,” saw Aaron (Josh Rivera) carted away in handcuffs for the murder of Odin Lloyd (J. Alex Brinson). While viewers and those who followed Hernandez’s story as it unfolded in real-time know that the athlete was guilty of the murder, Rivera’s performance conveys a blind optimism on Hernandez’s part as he believes he can win the case against him.

His confidence in getting out of trouble stems partly from past situations where he’s been spared legally as well as his legion of fans and the help of his family, including his mother Terri (Tammy Blanchard), brother D.J. (Ean Castellanos), cousin Tanya (Lindsay Mendez), and fiancée Shay (Jaylen Barron).

While Shay is conflicted about the situation, particularly when her involvement in discarding a box is raised by investigators, she’s pressured to do what’s best for Aaron at the expense of her own family, mourning the loss of Odin, who had been dating Shay’s sister. When Tanya doesn’t respond to her summons for court, the police come knocking and discover the car tied to another murder Aaron committed years before, suddenly shifting any sense of optimism.

Eric Liebowitz / FX

As Aaron finds himself behind bars celebrating his daughter’s birthday, he lets out a sad “I’m sorry” to his little girl when Shay steps away. And despite all of the atrocities he’s committed, Aaron’s depth of emotion is felt deeply in this final uttered sentence. When it came to balancing Aaron’s humanity with the darker sides of himself, star Rivera tells TV Insider, “That was something I thought about a lot while we were filming. A lot of accounts describe him as a good-humored person and somebody with a lot of charisma who is really goofy, and at times, fun to be around depending on who you talk to, and it’s important to show that angle.”

But at the same time, that also added to the shock value of Aaron’s arrest, as Rivera continues, “It’s important to show why people were so shocked when all of this went down. That’s a really critical part of the story.”

The shock is palpable for Shay, who has to grapple with the worldview she has of Aaron being completely transformed in a single moment. “You toe this line where that side of him is very important to why the story persisted so long after it happened. But then at the same time, you don’t want to let anybody off the hook by providing too much of an empathetic context,” Rivera further explains of his approach.

“Context is important to understand why the story is such a shock and why it is so fascinating because a lot of people who have committed crimes and done some pretty nasty things, you could find something in their life that’s relatable, as much as we don’t want to consider that from our very empathetic human brains,” Rivera continues. “We want to believe that a person who doesn’t evil things is 100 percent evil. If only things are that simple—it’s usually not that simple.”

It was Rivera’s goal to chronicle that shift from the Aaron viewers meet at the beginning of the episode to the version they spend time with in the season’s finale. “The web that he weaves himself into…  it starts to become [un]recognizable from the person that we were following in the first episode,” Rivera says, “And that’s really what I was trying to work towards. So that’s what I hope people see.”

While those familiar with Aaron’s case know how the story concludes, there is one more episode to this TV iteration of the events. Don’t miss it for yourself with the finale arrives on November 12 on FX.

American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, Tuesdays, 10/9c, FX