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Josh Rivera Takes the Lead in American Sports Story
When West Side Story was getting Oscar buzz, the actor was working as a barback. Now he’s playing Aaron Hernandez in a new Ryan Murphy show.
Rivera, who packed on nearly 30 pounds of muscle to play Aaron Hernandez, the late star Patriots tight end who was convicted of murder, bulges out of his loose cutoff beige shirt and gray shorts. “I didn’t know about a lot of the childhood stuff.” Per Jacobson’s suggestion, he watched a Netflix documentary — in which a purported male sexual partner of Hernandez’s spoke out — and listened to the podcast the show is based on, which fleshes out his relationship with a physically abusive, homophobic father and explains how he was shaped by the football industry’s protection of valuable players. The show’s hair and makeup artists helped Rivera physically transform as well; they made his nose more severe with a prosthetic bridge, and he endured a “medieval” three-hour process as they applied Hernandez’s tattoos to his body, his arms hanging from slings attached to the ceiling to make sure none of them rubbed off.
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