[This story contains spoilers from the fifth episode of American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, “The Man.”]

“Remind me who Bill Belichick is?” is what two-time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz asked upon learning he was on the shortlist to play the iconic New England Patriots coach in Ryan Murphy’s FX limited series American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez. “That’s how little I follow the NFL. I’m a big baseball fan, a hockey fan; football was never my sport,” he confesses to The Hollywood Reporter.

But Aaron Hernandez staff writer Domonique Foxworth not only knows who Belichick is, he also knows what it feels like to play football at a high level in high school, college and the NFL. During his career and after, he also held positions with the NFL Players Association. And he’s still a relevant voice in the sport today with his podcast, The Domonique Foxworth Show with ESPN.

While Foxworth’s position in the FX series initially began as a consultant, he found his way to the writers room, offering valuable insights into the sport at large, as well as the many broader themes Aaron Hernandez explores. And episode five, appropriately titled “The Man” and chronicling Aaron’s (Josh Rivera) introduction into the NFL, became Foxworth’s breakout opportunity to not only advance showrunner Stu Zicherman’s larger vision for the series, but to also enlighten and offer context about the sport at large and real people involved.

“I played in the league for a while and I was a part of the unions for football and for basketball, so I’ve been around sports my entire life,” says Foxworth. “Athletes are kind of stereotyped in a certain way and I thought that was one of the more attractive things about this story — it gives the opportunity to show many different sides of an athlete and many different sides of the world of professional sports in general.”

To that end, episode five is more than just the midway point of the 10-episode series. “Episode five was a really pivotal episode in my view and I was excited by the opportunity because we got into all those different things that I wanted to talk about,” says Foxworth. “There are high points in football, and then there’s also the difficulties of dealing with the stardom and the difficulties of dealing with the pressure, and all the particular difficulties that Aaron Hernandez had that were unique to him. It was the first true introduction to professional football.”

That rude awakening of pro football being different for Hernandez is clearly communicated in an early encounter with Coach Belichick, played by Butz. After his first practice, Hernandez is showering with his teammates, bragging on his performance. “I’m telling you, Brady and I got that chemistry bro,” he says, smiling when a veteran interrupts and reminds him “rookies get the pads.” Hernandez’s initial reluctance turns into a big smile as he strolls to the field completely naked, covered only by his signature tattoos to retrieve the pads. In the hallway, he unexpectedly encounters Belichick who drops the bombshell wakeup call.

“You know Coach Meyer said, ‘I need to stay on you.’ He said the second that I let you out of my sight, you’re trouble. But, uh, I’m not gone do that. That’s not my job,” he says with some distance between them. Then he gets closer and looks Hernandez in his eyes, piercing him with the statement. “This is a man’s team. Be a man,” he says, before walking away.

“That Belichick conversation is a good reference point. Honestly, I think that it speaks to a bunch of different things about Aaron,” explains Foxworth. “It’s a unique experience where you go from being a kid, a young adult I guess, but you’re still really reliant on a lot of people for help and guidance. And then all of a sudden you are the breadwinner in your family and you’re now expected to automatically have your maturity, catch up to your bank account almost immediately. The expectation, especially on that team, where they’d been really successful up to that point, and a lot of veteran guys knew what was expected of you. So I think inside the locker room and outside in regular life Aaron was expected to be a man, or an adult is probably a better way to put it. At no point prior to that did anyone expect him or teach him or show him [that]. All the way in college and high school, everyone is using Aaron for what he gives them.”

Belichick’s first appearance in episode five is not as stern as this moment. Instead, he’s initially seated in his office, with a pencil above his right ear, dressed in a signature gray New England Patriots Equipment hoodie, jamming out to Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life.” That Belichick that he never showed to the press is what Butz uncovered in his research.

“He loved rock and roll, going to concerts. He had a really good core group of friends. He was a great father; his kids adored him,” says Butz of the part of Belichick that NFL fans didn’t see as he was coaching the Patriots to six Super Bowl championships. It’s a softer side that Aaron presumably never saw either. “That front he put on [of] the impenetrable badass was all strategic, and brilliantly strategic.”

Butz, however, is clear about what role his portrayal serves. “It’s the Aaron Hernandez story, so we’re only seeing Coach Belichick in relation to those years when he was able to find a place in the Patriots for Aaron,” he says. “You got to remember, Aaron Hernandez was a fourth-round draft pick. Nobody wanted to touch this kid and it’s part of Belichick’s strategic genius that he thought, ‘okay I’ll take the risk.’”

That risk, as the series shows, was ultimately not the best one for Aaron. “It’s a very tragic story,” laments Butz. “In hindsight, in my opinion, for that young man to have played for the Patriots kind of sealed his fate. It triggered everything in that young man that shouldn’t have been triggered. His moving back to New England, having the proximity to that whole sketchy group that he was involved with, being given so much money,” he says, referring to his later contract.

“It was a record breaking-contract at the time; he was 20, 21, years old, without any resources either, no parenting resources, emotional resources, to deal with that kind of power to having a Coach like Belichick who was so unrelentingly tough on him, to be in a sport that, at the time, was not taking the issue of CTE and brain injury seriously enough, it was a perfect storm.”

“Essentially, when you take that next step, there are people that fall off from your life,” explains Foxworth, speaking from the personal experience of growing up in the Maryland area, playing high school and college football there and being drafted by the Denver Broncos. “You go from college to the NFL and those relationships grow apart and it’s not as convenient when you’re in Colorado and they’re in Baltimore. It gives you space to be a different version of yourself, or gives you space to grow into a more mature version of yourself. You’re off on your own and figuring it out. That’s the opposite thing that happened with Aaron.”

Butz also highlights the “toxic homophobia [Aaron] was raised in.” That and football, the Broadway star believes, put a heavy weight on his shoulder. “His sexuality, in my opinion, was a fluid one, but the sort of hypermasculine culture of football and his Puerto Rican father really demonized that whole part of him. It created a lot of fear, a lot of insecurity, [and] paranoia.”

Foxworth says the greater visibility of Shayanna Jenkins (Jaylen Barron), the mother of his daughter and his fiancée, who added Hernandez to her last name prior to his death, sheds light on Hernandez in episode five. “I think when we’re doing stories like this that are based on a true story, you have to have people to represent different parts of the story. There’s so many forks in the road that Aaron’s life goes in different ways. And I think Shay was supposed to represent another one,” he explains. “I think one of the best things about having Shay in there is it shows that even the closest person to him, because of his life, he can never fully be himself with anybody, even the mother of his daughter.”

To become Belichick, Butz underwent four hours of makeup. “Ryan Murphy is known to work with some of the best makeup and hair designers in the business. From The O.J. Story to Versace, they are just genius at creating that doppelganger effect. It was a long process for me. I think I do [naturally] share certain [features]. Belichick and I, we’re actually sons of first-generation European immigrants. He’s Croatian; my dad’s from Germany. Because the guy has coached his whole life and spent his whole life on the football field, he’s got that real great weatherbeaten face with those thick lines. So we had to do a lot of work to texturize all that skin. He has that kind of wispy hair, so we used a bald cap and then a wig on top of that. He’s not a tall guy, but he’s very broad-shouldered, very thick in the shoulders, and so am I but they even had to pad me with 30 extra pounds.

“It was a lot to go through,” he continues. “And some days it’s really miserable when you’re called at 3 a.m. to do it. But they’re so good at what they do, you look in the mirror and you’re like ‘oh, let’s just start shooting!’”

And while Butz worked on his Belichick scowl, he feels that making the future Pro Football Hall of Fame coach’s mumbled, garbled speech audible was the real challenge and credits the sound department for conquering that huge obstacle.

“It’s a fair look at Belichick, but it’s a critical one,” says newly converted football fan Butz. “It’s not something that I think is even personal to Belichick; we’re talking about something in the DNA of the league, of the sport. Hopefully this show and what a lot of sports journalists are writing about, what we know from a lot of medical research, is this can get better. We can have America’s greatest sport and protect the athletes.”

American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez releases new episodes Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on FX and Hulu.