Josh Andrés Rivera & Patrick Schwarzenegger To Star In ‘American Sports Story’ Season 1 About Aaron Hernandez
03.11.2023 - 21:33
/ deadline.com
The first installment of Ryan Murphy’s American Sports Story anthology series for FX will star Josh Andrés Rivera as Aaron Hernandez and Patrick Schwarzenegger as fellow former NFL star Tim Tebow. The season is based on the podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc from the Boston Globe and Wondery.
The project reunites Schwarzenegger with Murphy; the actor’s first TV role was on Murphy’s Scream Queens.
These are no new developments that happened during the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike; both castings were done in early 2023 but never confirmed by FX. Deadline reached out to the network and producing studio 20th Television about both in January-early February; the deals are believed to have closed at around that time or soon thereafter.
“We have a fairly complete set of scripts for American Sports Story by Stu Zicherman,” FX Chairman John Landgraf said at TCA on Jan 12, noting that the series is “heading toward production.”
That obviously has been delayed by the WGA strike, which started in May, and the SAG-AFTRA strike, which has been going on since July.
American Sports Story, one of two new offshoots in Ryan Murphy’s “American Story” franchise alongside American Love 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 first limited series installment 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.
Tebow and Hernandez were longtime friends going back before their time in the NFL. They were