BEN RAYNER

BY   NOJAN AMINOSHAREI

JOSH RIVERA IS struggling with his waistline. Before he took the role of Aaron Hernandez, the late New England Patriots tight end convicted of murder, for the new limited series American Sports Story, Rivera weighed 185 pounds. Hernandez’s playing weight was around 250. (You don’t need to be a sports analyst to do that math.) So Rivera bulked up. “I just worked out [with a trainer] like every day and ate a metric ton. That was really it,” he says. And he studied his notorious character. “We go through somebody’s entire life in ten episodes,” Rivera says of the challenge. “Add another layer, add another layer, add another layer.” Those layers included Hernandez’s childhood abuse, mental illness, drug use, and history of violent behavior.

At 29, Rivera is still practically a rookie in Hollywood. His first-ever onscreen credit was in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story in 2021. Next, he appeared in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. Now he’s leading a series from Ryan Murphy, the executive producer who made American Horror Story—and so many other TV hits through the years— happen. And he’s trying to trim down his waistline so he can get back into red-carpet-ready clothes. “None of my pants fit anymore,” he says. “I feel so bad for my stylist.”

He describes his regular wardrobe—jeans, a tee, and sneakers—as “suburban dad fashion.” But as he advances his career, he’s ready to level up his look, too. “It’s cool to flex my fashion muscle,” he says. Though when it comes to outerwear, “usually what happens is I buy a new jacket and say, ‘This year it’s this jacket.’ ”

Has Rivera found The One? “Not yet,” he says.

Good thing we’re here to help. We asked Rivera to field-test our editors’ picks for the best fall jackets of the upcoming season. Then we sat down with him to talk about getting into brick-house shape—and into the mind of a killer—in order to bring his complicated character to the screen.

BEN RAYNER

MEN’S HEALTH: You played football in high school. What position?

JOSH RIVERA: I was a guard and a linebacker.

MH: But then you quit to be in the school production of Les Misérables.

JR: I think this happens a lot in high school football. At a certain point, if it’s something you want to pursue, the caliber and frequency of effort you have to put in changes. Transitioning from junior varsity to varsity, it was way more intense. Everyone took it way more seriously. The dedication and time commitment was no joke. But I really liked to sing, too. I was in choir, and I had tried out for the musical. It was something new and exciting and ultimately really gratifying. It would be fun to say I was just absolutely agonizing over the choice, but really it came down to the fact that the musical was a lot of fun and I wasn’t getting hit in the face.

MH: Did your background in high school varsity help at all?

JR: Yeah, definitely. As clichéd as it sounds, there’s a feeling that comes with being part of a team and physically working together toward a goal. There’s this real bond and camaraderie that happens. And when you play under the lights, there’s this magic feeling that I think initially drew me to it in high school. I had a sense recall of what it felt like to be part of the game.

MH: The show includes a scene where Hernandez weighs in before the draft and they announce his 245-pound weight. How much did you have to put on to hit that number?

JR: I didn’t think I’d be able to do it until I did it. Before we started, I was about 185 pounds. Talking to you right now, I’m about 225. And that’s after I’ve been trying to lose weight since we finished shooting. The show hooked me up with a trainer—I still work with him. And I just had to eat a lot. Family and friends would ask me what my workout was, what the secret was. And there’s no secret. I just worked out like every day and ate a metric ton. That was really it. It’s quite straightforward—you just have to do it a lot.

MH: Actors in the past have complained about having to eat chicken cutlets all day every day to bulk up for roles. Did you feel that way?

JR: Honestly, I’m a pretty simple man. I would just put some hot sauce on it and call it a day. I can eat it all the time.

MH: Were you as eager for the weight training?

JR: I’ve been into weightlifting since college. I don’t remember what brought me to it initially; I must have been going through a breakup. I got really big, and a lot of my teachers—in ballet class and stuff like that—would tell me I needed to slim down. From an industry standpoint, it’s easier to get hired when you’re not quite as big. This is a specific look I’ve got going on right now, you know? So I always used to tell my friends, “I really wish I could get a role where they just pay me to get as big as possible.” And then this was that! I had an absolute blast. It was my total meathead summer.

BEN RAYNER

MH: Naturally, you want to have the kind of size and power that Aaron Hernandez was known for. But let’s not ignore the fact that there are a lot of locker-room scenes in this series, too. I imagine a little pride or vanity enters the equation there?

JR: I mean, there was definitely a bit of that. The idea to my training was: Just get big, just gain the weights, and then we’ll work on the musculature. And I had other people who worked out the specifics for me, who kept track of the body-fat percentages and all that stuff. I just had to do what they told me. But then we had a lot of actual athletes, former professional football players, and people like that who helped fill out our scenes. So, yeah, I started to get a little competitive. [Laughs.] Now I’m remembering how crafty [on-set catering] was my worst enemy. They put so much stuff, just all the stuff that’s the most delicious and the most horrible for you. So that was tough. Everyone was eating ice cream, and I was nursing a little salad. That part was a lot less fun than the “bulking up” part.

MH: You had to get into the head of a very complicated guy. There’s a lot of footage of him out on the field and in post-game interviews. There are court photographs and transcripts. There’s audio of his calls in prison. How much of that stuff did you go through?

JR: I paid a lot of attention to the research we had at our disposal. That was integral to making informed decisions about what I wanted to do with this character. But this isn’t a documentary; this is a story inspired by the events in a person’s life. So I tried to avoid direct imitation. That’s the kind of stuff that can get in the way of the actual work. I wanted to understand his disposition without spending too much time thinking about how to copy it. So I toed the line with the amount of visual content that I consumed. Particularly with somebody who has a lot of footage of them speaking publicly, like to the press—that might capture how he was in that context, but it’s going to be different from how he might have spoken privately to his friends or family.

So I did a lot of cross-analysis, comparing who he was in different situations. That’s a key part of what makes the story interesting. Aaron Hernandez was a lot of different people. In court, he’s going to have a different energy than he’s going to have right after he’s finished a football game. What’s so interesting about this guy is his chameleonic nature. Some of the prison phone calls are public record, so you can hear how he speaks to different people—and the tone he takes on, the tenderness or lack thereof, depending on the person he’s talking to. It was very interesting. I tried to carry all that when making a characterization.

BEN RAYNER

MH: This was a guy with a lot of trauma—he was a victim of physical and sexual abuse, he dealt with mental illness and drug use, he had potential brain damage from CTE, and he reportedly struggled with his sexuality. How do you factor all that into who he became?

JR: It’s so layered, it’s so complex. So many different issues were plaguing him at different times of his life. But the way I thought about it was that at any given moment, we do not have everything bad that’s ever happened to us at the forefront of our brain. We may react to something that has triggered us or reminded us of a trauma or taken us back to a moment from our past. But we’re not walking around with all of it at the surface, totally obvious to everybody around us. So depending on the circumstances that we were dealing with in a particular scene, I tied it back to one or two issues and focused on how they’re relevant. I tried not to focus on a bunch of stuff at once—it’s just too much to swallow and too much to portray.

MH: You play Hernandez from high school to college to the NFL to his trial to his prison sentence to his eventual death. He had a lot of promise, then he had a lot of anger, and then there are reports that he felt a sense of calmness in prison. How did you approach this evolution?

JR: It all connected a little more seamlessly than you would expect it to. For example, when you say he was surprisingly more carefree in prison, it does connect to a long thread throughout this character about how he never felt like he could be himself. He was trying to be what everybody else wanted him to be—a chameleon trying to fit in and not necessarily succeeding. And then he finds himself, with everything said and done, in prison. And now he doesn’t have to pretend anymore. He doesn’t have to try so hard anymore. You wouldn’t think that being in prison would put a person at ease, but that’s what may have ended up happening, at least according to certain sources.

We go through somebody’s entire life in ten episodes. So you set down a layer in the first episode, then you add another layer in the second episode. Add another layer, add another layer, add another layer. Then you get to the end, and there’s still this thread from layer one that goes through all the way to layer 15.

Courtesy FX
Rivera as Hernandez in his Patriots gear.

Jim Rogash / Getty Images

Aaron Hernandez practicing before a 2012 game for the New England Patriots.

MH: For the most part, this is a serious drama. But the actor playing Rob Gronkowski is having such a fun time playing Gronk. How did you keep a straight face when he pulled off his signature Gronk laugh?

JR: Dude, he did so many takes and said something completely different and insane every take. There was one where he just goes, “Hey, I’m Gronk—oh my God, that’s Tom Brady! He’s so tan!” My saving grace was that the back of my head was to the camera in that scene, so you couldn’t see me losing it. He was so funny, man. And that was really nice, because everything else outside of those scenes was pretty heavy.

MH: After college, you were in the traveling company of Hamilton. Then your very first movie credit was in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. Two years later, you were in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. And now you’re the star of a Ryan Murphy production. You essentially did a speed run of Hollywood. How’d you handle it?

JR: It’s a little bit of a shock to the system, I won’t lie. I preface everything to everyone with “This is all really new to me.” I'm constantly worried that I’m going to commit some kind of faux pas. So far I’ve been able to live my life as just some guy. But yesterday I was walking around in socks and sandals and a stained shirt. Then I thought, Oh man, I don’t really have a lot of time before people start commenting on those sorts of things. But largely, my life has not changed. I do a lot of traveling for work, which is an amazing luxury. But day-to-day, I’m just doing nerdy stuff at my house and playing video games with my friends.

MH: You’ve been dating actress Rachel Zegler, whom you appeared alongside in both West Side Story and Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. Does it help to navigate Hollywood with another actor?

JR: We understand each other, which is really nice. It’s helpful to have somebody who understands your experience and is with you as a part of a community.

This interview has been condensed for content and clarity.

BEN RAYNER

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