FX has tapped Josh Andrés Rivera as Aaron Hernandez and Patrick Schwarzenegger as fellow former NFL star Tim Tebow for Ryan Murphy’s American Sports Story, according to Deadline.
- The first season of Murphy’s American Sports Story will be based on the podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc from the Boston Globe and Wondery.
- The castings were done prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike but were just now confirmed by FX.
- American Sports Story was originally announced, along with other new and returning series, in 2021.
- sports figure and re-examines it through the prism of today’s world, telling that story from multiple perspectives.”
- “American Sports Story is a scripted anthological limited series focusing on a prominent event involving a sports figure and re-examines it through the prism of today’s world, telling that story from multiple perspectives.”
- “The limited series charts the rise and fall of NFL superstar Aaron Hernandez and explores the connections of the disparate strands of his identity, his family, his career, his suicide, and their legacy in sports and American culture”
- Hernandez and Tebow were longtime friends going back to their time at the University of Florida, where they won the BCS Championship in 2009.
- Stu Zicherman (The Americans) is the writer and Executive Producer and Ryan Murphy, Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, Alexis Martin Woodall and Brad Falchuk are Executive Producers.
- Hernan Lopez and Marshall Lewy of Wondery (Dr. Death) are Executive Producers alongside Executive Producers Linda Pizutti Henry and Ira Napoliello of The Boston Globe.
- The series will reunite Murphy with Schwarzenegger, whose first TV role was on Murphy’s Scream Queens.