Jaylen Barron already knew of Shayanna Jenkins before she signed on to the FX series American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez. After watching one of the several unscripted projects documenting Hernandez’s rise to NFL fame and subsequent incarceration, Barron, like most people who followed the highly-publicized trial in 2015, thought she knew the kind of people the notorious couple were. Hernandez was convicted of killing Jenkins’s sister’s boyfriend, Odin Lloyd; Jenkins remained his loyal partner throughout the trial. “I was like, Couldn't be me,” Barron tells Marie Claire of her first impression of Jenkins. “That's a real rider, and that's not me. So it was really interesting that it literally ended up being me [playing her]."
But now that she’s spent 10 episodes in Jenkins’ shoes on the Ryan Murphy-produced true-crime series, Barron feels much more compassion for her real-life counterpart. Over light bites at SoHo House Hollywood in early October, the former Blindspotting and Free Rein star speaks fondly of Shayanna, defending the former NFL fiancé as she would an old friend but still making sure to choose her words carefully as any media-trained actress would. Barron, 27, grew up near Los Angeles in the Inland Empire, and the self-professed lover girl knows that there’s a world of difference between her upbringing as a child actor and Jenkins’ in the town of Bristol, Connecticut, that shaped Jenkins’ decisions in her early 20s. [Ed note: Jenkins, who’s now an insurance broker and mother of two, was not involved in American Sports Story’s production, and has not publicly commented on the series.] In addition to watching Jenkins’ media interviews following Hernandez’s death, and Hernandez’s games with the Florida Gators and New England Patriots, Barron based her performance on universal feelings: the urge to give a cute boy the answers in English class, the discomfort at not knowing what a crush is thinking. “I really feel like she did the best that she could with her knowledge and what she had going for her,” she says of the woman she used to criticize.
