It’s reasonable to ask then if there’s anything left to say about Hernandez, the Connecticut native whose heinous crimes cost three people their lives and cut short a promising NFL career. Stuart Zicherman, creator and writer of the new FX series, “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez,” thinks there is.

“I actually wasn’t sure until I read the Globe piece,” Zicherman said. “In our modern news cycle, stories get simplified or sensationalized, and Aaron was always just sort of portrayed as a monster. The Globe’s reporting opened it up, and the levels of complexity made it a different story.”

The FX show, the latest installment of executive producer Ryan Murphy’s “American Story” franchise, is based on the Globe/Wondery podcast, “Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc.” Over 10 episodes, the show, which debuts Tuesday on FX and begins streaming on Hulu the next day, chronicles the trajectory of Hernandez’s life — from Bristol, Conn., where he grew up with an angry, abusive father; to Gainesville, Fla., where he flourished as a talented but troubled college football player; to Massachusetts, where out-of-control drug use and escalating paranoia led him to behave ever more violently.

By 2015, barely three years removed from an appearance in the Super Bowl and signed to a $41 million contract with the Patriots, Hernandez, then just 25, was behind bars. He’d been convicted of murdering Odin Lloyd, a sweet-tempered, semi-pro football player who was dating the sister of Hernandez’s fiancee, and indicted for the 2012 murders of two other men, Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado. (Though later acquitted of those killings, Hernandez was convicted of unlawful possession of the firearm used in the murders.)

Because many in the public now regard the onetime football star as a remorseless killer, Zicherman said the challenge in the writers’ room was to give Hernandez “humanity and depth and complexity,” but do so without seeming to rationalize his criminal behavior.

So “American Sports Story” threads aspects of Hernandez’s background and personality that may have contributed to his downfall, including his occasionally violent homelife, the potential effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) caused by repeated football-related blows to the head, his uneasiness about his sexuality, his rampant drug and alcohol use, and a fascination with guns.

“My approach was to explore what Aaron did, how he did it, and why he did it, but without ever excusing the fact that he did do it,” said Zicherman, whose TV writing credits include episodes of “The Americans” and “The Affair.”

“We never forgive Aaron for being a murderer,” Zicherman said.

The show comes with a customary caveat. At the end of each episode, a message on screen reminds viewers that “American Sports Story” is a dramatization, not a documentary. While it’s inspired by actual events, some of the characters, characterizations, incidents, locations, and dialogue in the series are “imagined or invented.”

Actor Josh Andres Rivera, who plays Hernandez, said the appeal of the role was the football player’s complicated backstory, especially his fraught relationship with his father, his secrecy about his bisexuality, and the way in which some powerful people — notably Urban Meyer, Hernandez’s coach at the University of Florida, and Patriots owner Robert Kraft and coach Bill Belichick — either overlooked or minimized his off-the-field problems.

“Aaron learns that he can get away with things because he’s physically talented. He’s a toy that people can use to win,” Rivera said. “It’s a lesson he learns very early on and, unfortunately, that really weaponizes his ability to keep getting away with things.”

Rivera, who weighed about 185 pounds when he played Chino in Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake of “West Side Story,” said he had to bulk up quite a bit to approximate Hernandez’s 245-pound frame. “A big part of the pre-production process was just eating a ton of food and working out all the time,” he said.

But the role required more than big muscles, a prosthetic to raise the bridge of the actor’s nose, and the painstaking application of temporary tattoos up and down his arms and across his chest and back. Rivera also studied how Hernandez, whose mother, Terri, is Italian and father, Dennis, was Puerto Rican, carried himself — the way he walked and talked.

“There was a level of swagger and confidence that he had that, I think, halfway worked in my body. I channeled that as best I could,” Rivera said. “But I couldn’t go so far into it that it didn’t feel right or couldn’t make it look natural.”

While Belichick, Kraft, and Hernandez’s former University of Florida teammate Tim Tebow (played by actor Patrick Schwarzenegger) all figure prominently in the story, former Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, who connected with Hernandez on 20 touchdowns in their three seasons together, is a negligible presence in the show.

“It never really popped to me,” Zicherman said of the Hernandez-Brady relationship. “This is really more about the culture of the Patriots.”

But the show is also about the bond between the damaged NFL player and his devoted fiancee, Shayanna Jenkins, the mother of Hernandez’s only child, a daughter. (The pair attended Bristol Central High School together and became a couple after Hernandez was drafted by the Patriots in 2010.)

Actress Jaylen Barron, who plays Jenkins in the series, said she didn’t know much about the Hernandez saga until she watched the three-part Netflix docuseries, “Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez,” which came out in 2020.

“I remember specifically looking at Shayanna and saying, ‘Could not be me. Could not be me,’” said Barron. “And here we are. It is, in fact, me. I’m here doing this.”

Barron, who appeared in the Starz series “Blindspotting” and Showtime’s “Shameless,” believes Jenkins was misrepresented by some in the media, portrayed as an unthinking accomplice rather than a young woman who refused to believe the father of her baby was capable of murder.

“When all of this first happened, she was ridiculed in the media…It’s so easy to villainize people.” Barron said. “It was important to me that we give Shayanna some dignity. She didn’t know what she was doing — she was a new mom trying to keep her life together.”

Even though most people know how the Hernandez story ends, Zicherman thinks “American Sports Story” will give them something to think about.

“What was his journey?” he said. “If we’re going to say that Aaron Hernandez wasn’t born a murderer, then what was he?”

Mark Shanahan can be reached at mark.shanahan@globe.com. Follow him @MarkAShanahan.