There's No Big Mystery in 'Aaron Rodgers: Enigma'

The three-part Netflix documentary shows sweaty reverence for the NFL superstar, Covid pariah, and ayahuasca aficionado — but fails to prove he's a riddle to be solved

Aaron Rodgers: Enigma, a new Netflix docuseries about the great and apparently greatly misunderstood NFL quarterback, begins with a tattoo. After the Green Bay Packers trade him in early 2023 to the New York Jets, Rodgers decides to change his jersey number from 12 to 8, which in turn inspires him to get the tat: a dragon eating its own tail while curled into the shape of an infinity symbol.

“Eight sideways is infinity,” Rodgers explains as his left biceps is inked. “So, definitely wanted the infinity symbol. Then I woke up this morning and I had an intuition about a dragon.”

The tattoo is basically an ouroboros, a symbol (typically it’s a dragon or snake coiled in a circle with its tail in its mouth) that’s been used for thousands of years by cultures all over the world to represent everything from death to rebirth to destruction to eternity. So it’s quite literally one of the most ubiquitous images in human history, yet Rodgers seems to suggest he came up with it that morning. It’s a relatively small thing, but it’s indicative of how the series repeatedly ignores or distorts reality in order to advance a very specific narrative: that Aaron Rodgers is an iconoclastic warrior-philosopher whose quest for truth and spiritual enlightenment is as misunderstood as it is brave.

Over the course of its three episodes, Enigma tells the story of roughly the past year of Rodgers’ life, which hasn’t been easy. In September 2023, in his hugely anticipated first game with the Jets, he tears his Achilles tendon on the fourth play of the season. It’s a devastating injury for any athlete, but particularly one who is nearly 40 years old. The series documents his maniacal physical rehabilitation and the steps he takes in the midst of it to maintain his mental and spiritual self. Interspersed throughout are looks back at Rodgers’ life, from growing up in Northern California where he idolized San Francisco 49ers legend Joe Montana, to his initial failure to secure a college scholarship, to his years with the Packers and his move to the Jets. Rodgers narrates much of his story, which is augmented by personal photos and home video, footage of him playing football and being interviewed, and appearances by those who knew and know him, including teammates Marshawn Lynch and Davonte Adams, and coaches Mike McCarthy and Matt LaFleur.

The series is the latest example of the documentary-style biographies that have become almost as de rigueur as product endorsements for America’s most transcendent athletes. It’s co-directed and executive produced by Gotham Chopra, who in 2016 founded the production studio Religion of Sports with NFL Hall of Famers Tom Brady and Michael Strahan. Chopra has produced docs about a murderer’s row of athletes including Brady, Kobe Bryant, Simone Biles, David Ortiz, and Serena Williams. (Chopra also produced a 2012 documentary about his father, Deepak.)

Rodgers is without question a worthy addition to that list, but as the title of the series forewarns, even after watching more than three hours of Rodgers in intimate settings discussing highly personal things, it somehow feels like he has eluded you. This, however, is not because he’s some kind of unknowable riddle. (A biography of Rodgers published earlier this year went even harder in its title: Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers.) It’s because Rodgers is cagey and the filmmakers don’t challenge him.

Though often frustrating in the documentary, his reticence is fascinating to witness when directed at others. It’s his eyes; large and blue, they sometimes look slightly unfocused, as though behind them Rodgers is busy doing what he does so well on a football field: Seeing things before they happen and computing his next move. His eyes also betray feelings not reflected by his words or smile. Nowhere in the series is this more apparent than in a conversation with Brett Favre, the odious Hall of Fame quarterback Rodgers replaced on the Packers. Favre was notoriously cold to the rookie, but while sitting here with Rodgers years later, Favre paints their relationship in a positive light and himself as a good teammate. Rodgers mostly smiles and agrees. But not with his eyes.

Rodgers’ brain is the real star of the documentary, which sets out in its first episode to prove that Rodgers is very smart — which he unquestionably is — but tries so hard that it ends up decoupled from reality. As we learn about Rodgers’ early life, the defensive coordinator of his high school football team talks about the young QB’s unparalleled ability to process information. We then see present-day Rodgers in a private jet doing a crossword puzzle… because smart people do those? The answer he is shown filling in is “NASA,” presumably because it is a place full of smart people.

With absolutely no lead-up, Rodgers then proceeds to explain to others on the plane his system for figuring out the squares of numbers. The method he describes does work, but see if you can follow him:

“Any two-digit number I can give you the square in a short amount of time,” he begins. “There’s a trick to it. Like, 25. What’s 25 squared? It’s 625. You take 25, you go up and down to a round number. So you go up five and down five. Thirty times 20 is 600. You take the square of however much you went up and down, five, and add that to it. So, a harder one would be 34, right? So you go down to 30 and up to 38. So the same amount up and down. I went up 4. So 30 times 38 is 1,140. Then you add 16 to that so it’s 1,156.”

This is not an example of Rodgers’ brain being bigger than everyone else’s. It’s just him explaining a relatively straightforward concept very poorly. He follows that up by discussing his ability as a kid to compute batting averages — it’s basic long division — while playing a baseball board game called Strat-O-Matic. As he talks, we see stylized slo-mo video of dice rolling across the game board and close-ups of the playing cards, which conveys a goofily outsized amount of gravitas, like we’re looking at Albert Einstein’s slide rule as he explains relativity.

Mercifully, one of Rodgers’ companions then turns the conversation to football, and Rodgers discusses the numbers he must remember and process while performing what is arguably the most mentally demanding job in all of sports, quarterbacking an NFL team. He explains the odds of success for completing different passes and what makes those odds higher or lower, from the route being run to the receiver running the route to where exactly Rodgers places his throw. Hearing him explain the ridiculously difficult thing he does better than almost anyone has ever done it is what offers actual insight into his mind.

Like a lot of trilogies, Enigma’s second episode is its best, with more vérité footage that allows us to see who Rodgers is and less try-hard messaging telling us who Rodgers is. The episode centers around a trip he takes to Costa Rica for an ayahuasca retreat, something he’s been repeatedly and unfairly mocked for doing in the past. For several days, he and a group of about 10 people (including NFL safeties Adrian Colbert and Jordan Poyer) are led by guides as they take the drug, participate in a sweat lodge ceremony, and get weird in drum circles. One evening, the group sits around a fire passing a massive pipe. Rodgers, who looks happier and more at ease than at any other time in the series, takes a drag and begins talking about the kinds of things people in altered states often talk about — how crazy existence is, and how wonderful it is to be with the people he’s with.

“It makes me remember,” he says, his eyes beginning to well up with tears, “my life matters. I’ve got a host of ancestors backing me up. I’ve got the unseen world, and the whispers of the universe, telling me I matter, I’m enough.”

Rodgers has been dragged in the media for being smug and self-involved, and most pro athletes exude an air of invincibility in part because they think they really are invincible — and, in the case of football, have to think they’re invincible in order to do what they do. But more than once in Enigma Rodgers reveals self-doubt and vulnerability. 

“Every year I gotta remind myself that I’m great,” he says at one point. “Even though I could come off an MVP year, you have the doubts, like, ‘Can I still do this at a high level? Am I still good enough?’”

He doesn’t go on ayahuasca retreats because he’s a crunchy hippie or based bro. He does it to stay sane, which may be more difficult now than it’s been for his entire career. He says that repeatedly proving he’s still great is a “fun challenge,” but as anyone who has watched the 4-10 Jets play football this year knows, few players, including a diminished Rodgers, appear to be having much fun.

The series culminates with the fallout from Rodgers’ infamous answer to a reporter who asked him in August 2021 if he’d gotten a Covid vaccination. “I’m immunized,” Rodgers said, and naturally everyone assumed he meant he had gotten vaccinated. He had not. Instead, he’d gone to a homeopathic specialist who, he told Joe Rogan, administered a “diluted strand of the virus” orally for a couple of months. When Rogan asked how this specialist had procured the virus, Rodgers said he didn’t know.

In the documentary, Rodgers attempts to explain his reasoning for not taking the vaccine and for flouting and speaking out against Covid protocols at a time when more than 600,000 Americans had died of the disease. He questions the efficacy of vaccines, explaining that the yearly flu vaccine is only 15 percent effective. Thing is, that number is totally incorrect — the real rate is generally three times that — but the filmmakers don’t bother correcting that misinformation or, if doing so would have derailed the flow of the doc, omitting it.

Unbelievably, Rodgers blames the debacle on reporters for not following up with another question that would have forced him to clarify his answer. He adds, however, that he’s not being judgmental about people who are upset by his behavior, in part because he doesn’t “resonate with that energy.” This is like a kid who lied about eating his vegetables telling his annoyed mom that he forgives her.

This is Rodgers at his worst, and it’s probably no coincidence that the sequence is followed in the episode by footage of and testimonials about Rodgers being a great guy, working with charities and being generous and warm to fans. This includes one woman he calls his “Tahoe Grandma,” who’d introduced herself 20 years before at a celebrity golf tournament and with whom he’s been close ever since. Rodgers would certainly not say he’s perfect (though the filmmakers might), and he has sometimes been treated unfairly in the media. But he seems to conflate the unfair criticism of his personal life and the run-of-the-mill criticism of his on-field play with the very valid criticism of the way he’s handled the subject of vaccines and other conspiracy theories. The doc muddles it all as well, portraying Rodgers’ life as a series of injustices, slights, and unfounded attacks he has had to overcome. There is little room there for nuance, and nuance is needed to solve enigmas.