Patrick Schwarzenegger is the biggest football fan of his immediate family. “I’m the person that my fiancée can’t get off the couch on Saturdays and Sundays,” he tells Entertainment Weekly.

It’s fair to say he was already well versed on names like Aaron Hernandez and Tim Tebow, especially when they were coming up as athletes on the Florida Gators team, but being involved in the first season of FX’s new anthology series American Sports Story gave Schwarzenegger a new perspective. “I think that it’s a very dark and disturbing and heartbreaking life and story that always seems to interest people,” he says of the Hernandez scandal.

Following career-making turns in The Staircase and Gen V, and with season 3 of The White Lotus on the docket, Schwarzenegger makes his debut as Tebow, as seen in exclusive first-look photos from American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez. “Obviously, this project and this series is about Aaron. It’s really his story,” the actor notes. “Tebow is just a little sliver of Aaron’s life.”

The 10-episode season, from creator, writer, and executive producer Stuart Zicherman, takes its main inspiration from Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc., the popular podcast from the Boston Globe and Wondery. It dramatizes the events of the real-world tragedy: Hernandez (played by West Side Story and Hunger Games standout Josh Rivera), a tight end for the New England Patriots, murders semi-professional footballer Odin Lloyd and is later found dead in his jail cell from an apparent suicide. The main narrative follows the lead-up to the act, including his rise through the ranks of collegiate football, his struggles with his sexuality, the lingering memories of his harsh upbringing at the hands of his late father, forays with drug use and drug dealers, and the long-term effects of head trauma sustained on the field.

Appearing in the orbit of Rivera’s Hernandez are Jaylen Barron as his future fiancé Shayanna Jenkins, Lindsay Mendez as his older cousin Tanya Singleton, Ean Castellanos as his brother DJ Hernandez, Tammy Blanchard as his mother Terri Hernandez, Tony Yazbeck as Gators head coach Urban Meyer, Thomas Sadoski as his agent Brian Murphy, Jake Cannavale as high school love interest Chris, and Norbert Leo Butz as then-Patriots head coach Bill Belichick.

The subject of Aaron Hernandez was first developed for American Crime Story, one of Ryan Murphy‘s other TV franchise banners that brought us The People v. O.J. Simpson, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, and the Monica Lewinsky-inspired Impeachment. “We all decided that it didn’t quite fit,” executive producer Brad Simpson recalls. “Even though it had a lot of those elements, it was really telling a story about sports culture in America. We wanted to use it as a launching pad to explore America’s religion, which is sports.”

“Part of my love of sports is not for the sport itself; it’s about the drama, the characters, the situations,” Zicherman adds. “The truth is this particular story has so many big ideas and themes. Aaron’s story, and even beyond Aaron’s story, is important thematically in American culture.”

To Schwarzenegger, Tebow’s role within the fabric of the show was to be “this light in the tunnel for Aaron.” While together at the University of Florida, the actor says, “[He] recognized that Aaron was struggling and was trying to be this good force and utilize faith in his love of Jesus and churchgoing and the values that come as a Christian man to help Aaron. Unfortunately, [he] wasn’t able to fully succeed.”

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Rivera, who worked with the lead producers of American Sports Story on The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, became acquainted with the story of Hernandez much later than Schwarzenegger. “Much to the marketing department’s chagrin, I’m not really a huge football follower. Mainly what I knew about the Patriots was they were the best team in Madden,” the actor says playfully, referring to the popular football video game series. It was all “the media hubbub,” he notes, including the 2020 Netflix documentary Killer Inside, that caught him up to speed.

There were too many resources Rivera would deem as “speculative” and hard to verify. So he stuck with what he could see with his eyes: television appearances, post-game interviews, court files, phone calls made from prison, and the like. “Because it is an adaptation, I can’t imitate completely this other person, and I think it doesn’t do the story justice to try at a certain point, I have to choose a characterization, which is really hard and it’s kind of a big risk,” Rivera explains. “You don’t want to show any disrespect or anything, but I felt comfortable and confident with the amount of material I was given and with a team that I was around — but it was overwhelming, initially. I won’t lie.”

Schwarzenegger had a similar journey with Tebow. “I worked with a speech coach a lot on his voice because he has a little bit of a lisp,” the actor says. “He gets really riled up all the time. It’s almost like he is running out of breath when he’s talking, and his physicality is just this huge teddy bear that’s so energized 24/7. I watched hours and hours of footage of him giving sermons at different stages and auditoriums, and watching the body language. His voice was probably the most interesting thing to me. How he just couldn’t contain his excitement for his faith and for his message was something that I tried to really dive into and play.”

American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez premieres Tuesday, Sep. 17, on FX and Hulu.