Aaron Hernandez actor on filming Odin Lloyd murder scene: ‘Extremely tense’

Josh Rivera, the actor portraying Aaron Hernandez in Ryan Murphy’s new biopic series American sports historyreflected with Newsweek on the scene that was most difficult for him to film.

The eighth episode of the FX hit series aired last week and centered on the former New England Patriots player’s June 2013 murder of his brother-in-law, Odin Lloyd.

It is believed that Lloyd may have known Hernandez’s deep dark secret that he was attracted to men.

In an interview with Newsweek at the series premiere in September, Rivera said, “The Odin Lloyd sequence was really, really difficult for me emotionally. It was a night shoot, so everyone was already very tired, and it was just extremely tense and very sad.”

Rivera continued “I think it really drove home to me the reality of, you know, a victim and their family. I think we consume things all the time that are interesting when you talk about true crime- documentaries or something like that, and there’s this kind of barrier between reality that exists for whatever reason.”

“I think our brain does it to protect us. I think it’s a psychological mechanism that we have a hard time really digesting that this happened and these are people it happened to and the reality of that really settled with me during that scene.”

Once one of the most promising tight ends in the NFL, Hernandez formed one of the most dangerous tight end tandems in league history with Rob Gronkowski on the Patriots.

However, his football career came to an abrupt and shocking end in 2013 when he was arrested and charged with Lloyd’s murder.

After his arrest, the Patriots released Hernandez from the team.

In 2015, Hernandez was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Two years later, Hernandez was acquitted of double-murder charges in a 2012 case, but days later he was found dead in his jail cell after committing suicide.

Hernandez was involved in the July 2012 murders of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado, who were shot and killed in a drive-by shooting in Boston.

Hernandez was eventually charged with the murders in 2014, but he was acquitted in April 2017, just days before his death. Prosecutors claimed Hernandez shot the men after one of them accidentally spilled a drink on him at a nightclub.

Rivera also spoke Newsweek about how he feels the current prevalence of social media would have affected Hernandez’s crimes.

“I imagine he probably would have been suspended a little more often from college and from professional games,” Rivera said.

“Maybe people would have been a lot less shocked and dazzled by it all if more people had been recording the whole time. I think that was a big part of what made the story so complex that it seemed like no one had a clue , that something like that was remotely possible, let alone likely judging from the character’s impulsiveness, I don’t know if it would have changed his actions very much, but I think the public perception of it all might have been a slightly different.”

10th and last section of American Sports History: Aaron Hernandez aired on November 12 at 10 p.m. on FX and streamed the next day on Hulu. The previous nine episodes are currently streaming on Hulu.

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling 988, texting “988” to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or visiting 988lifeline.org.

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