It wasn’t long ago that Aaron Rodgers was among the NFL’s most beloved stars.

One of the most gifted quarterbacks to ever play, Rodgers achieved another level of celebrity off the field. He was a ubiquitous spokesman for State Farm and an acclaimed guest host of Jeopardy!, performing so well in the latter role that he was considered as a possible successor for the late Alex Trebek. Politically, Rodgers was seen as a thoughtful progressive. He called out the NFL for blackballing Colin Kaepernick and expressed support for players who kneeled during the national anthem, even if he didn’t himself.

But as he enters his 20th season in the NFL, now playing for the Jets, Rodgers invites a different description. He is, as Ian O’Connor writes in a new biography, “the most compelling and polarizing figure in professional football, hands down,” a distinction that Rodgers, the author says, has had “for years.”

Well, for nearly the last three years, at least. In Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers, O’Connor zeroes in on August 26, 2021, as the start of Rodgers’s metamorphosis. That was when, after being asked by a reporter if he had been vaccinated against COVID-19, Rodgers said he had been “immunized.” The response, O’Connor observes, “ultimately changed the way he was perceived by an untold number of people.” Rodgers tested positive for COVID-19 less than three months later, making his previous comments look more than a little misleading. But the ensuing backlash did little to chasten him. In the years that followed, Rodgers spoke skeptically (as well as gratuitously) about the COVID vaccine and also peddled various conspiracy theories. By the end of the 2022 season, State Farm quietly ended its 12-year partnership with Rodgers, completing his transformation from marketable star to public contrarian.

A biographer of sporting icons including Bill Belichick, Mike Krzyzewski, and Derek Jeter, O’Connor uses his new book to chart Rodgers’s evolution in the court of public opinion, as well as his stormy familial history. Rodgers severed ties with his parents, brothers, and other family members about a decade ago, leaving them all mystified by the estrangement. O’Connor wades through various theories for the falling-out: Rodgers’s parents blame his ex-girlfriend Olivia Munn; others attribute the shunning to the family’s devout Christian beliefs; and some point to his brothers’ exploitation of his fame. Out of the Darkness can only illuminate so much of the Rodgers family drama, despite the author’s rich reportage. O’Connor conducted 250 interviews for the book, which included extensive conversations with Rodgers’s parents, Ed and Darla, and some face time with Rodgers himself. As a result, O’Connor was able to unearth new insights, such as Rodgers’s admission that he should have told the truth about his vaccination status and details about an emotional encounter between father and son at a celebrity golf tournament last summer, which raised new hopes for a reconciliation.

I spoke to O’Connor about all of that over the phone last week. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Vanity Fair: This is an unauthorized biography, but you did manage to sit down with Rodgers at his home in Malibu earlier this year, which you detailed in the book’s prologue. What was that conversation like, and how difficult was it to get him to agree to talk to you?

Ian O’Connor: It was very difficult. At the introductory press conference in New Jersey, the Jets PR executive had introduced me to him because he knew I was about to start a book project on Aaron. So I got a few minutes with him after the press conference to explain my process.

I sort of gave my two-minute presentation and he laughed. He goes, “Yeah, I got a question. Are you planning on talking to me for this book?” I said, Well, I would love to. Obviously, that’s your decision. I think my previous subjects have found me to be quite fair in my appraisals of their lives. But yeah, obviously I would love to talk to you. He didn’t commit to anything, so I kept checking in with the Jets. I sent Aaron and his agent messages. I sent him my biography of Belichick, my biography of Coach K. Didn’t hear anything back.

I had to hand in the manuscript in January of this year, so I handed it in without him. All of a sudden, in February, I get a message from the Jets: “Aaron’s willing to talk to you now.” So I had to tell my editor, Hey, we gotta go back into this book. I fly out to Malibu. They never committed to any time. I had told the Jets that I’m willing to fly out there even if it’s just an hour, just to check facts. I had no idea if it was going to be an hour, so I had to prioritize what I was going to ask him. I knew that he was not going to sit there and give me his life story. So a lot of it was about his family and fact-checking on that. I had to pick and choose things. He ended up giving me two hours.

I didn’t get a chance to ask him a number of things I wanted to, but I focused on what I thought was most important. He was very engaging. I actually think he’s arguably the best interview in the NFL, even if you hate his positions on a number of things. He is an engaging talker. He’s very thoughtful. He’s very quotable. I know, in talking to Packers beat writers, he was very good to walk up to at his locker. A lot of star quarterbacks are not like this.

He was honest; he was thoughtful; he was engaging. He was all of those things. And he made it a better book. Obviously, I wish I had 15 hours with him. It wasn’t full cooperation. This was end-of-the-process fact-checking, and so it was very limited cooperation. But it was more than I got from Belichick. It was more than I got from Coach K. So I definitely appreciated it.

You wrote that your meeting with him was mostly a respectful give-and-take, but there were a few tense exchanges. What were those about? I assume it probably dealt with the familial drama.

Yeah, and also the COVID thing, because people forget that changed his public life. I mean, he was not considered a villain at all. He was actually considered one of the good guys in sports. He supported Colin Kaepernick and his right to protest. Even though he didn’t kneel, he supported the players’ right to do that. He was one of the few white athletes I saw who admitted publicly that he thought the owners were keeping Kaepernick out of the league because of his position and his protests. There was a national anthem, after the [2015] terrorist attack in Paris, where a fan shouted out an anti-Muslim slur, and he rebuked that fan publicly. [Barack] Obama thanked him for doing that. He was involved in charitable causes to help victims of the war in the Congo.

It was his press conference when he said, “Yeah, I’ve been immunized.” That changed his whole public image when it later came out that he was not vaccinated and he misled everybody. So when we talked about that, I think it got a little tense. I told him, Listen, I was vaccinated, but if I were a columnist that worked at the Green Bay or Milwaukee outlets and I was sitting in that press conference and you told your truth––which was that he was allergic to an ingredient in the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines and he was concerned about side effects with Johnson & Johnson––I really don’t think I would’ve ripped you for that. I think that’s a fairly reasonable position. Now, not everybody would’ve felt that way, but I think you would’ve gotten 20% of the criticism that you got ultimately for effectively lying. So that got a little tense.

He told me, I should have told the truth. That’s the first time he’s ever said that. So, I mean, it was very good. A little tense, but that’s good. I had no problem with that. I wanted honesty.

After Rodgers was traded to the Jets last year, he went on this charm offensive in New York City. He was attending Broadway shows; he was courtside at Madison Square Garden. He acquitted himself quite well on Hard Knocks during training camp too. It felt like he was in the process of rehabilitating his image. But then, come January, he finds himself in this unsavory feud with Jimmy Kimmel. Do you think this is what to expect from Rodgers going forward?

Yes, I think this is who he is forevermore. Now, it might change if he becomes a broadcaster after his career is over, and I think he’d be a great one. When he’s talking football, it’s unbelievable how good he is. I think he could be one of the best analysts ever if he decides to do that––and if his play-by-play person can keep him talking about football and not straying off into other topics. But look, last spring and summer, it was a lovefest unlike any I’ve ever seen in New York, at least with an acquired superstar.

I think he wanted to test that love. Here he is in this liberal market, New York City, and he comes in and it was like nobody in New York cared about his positions. It was like, We just want to see this great player play, take this Charlie Brown franchise to new heights, but he couldn’t help himself. He had to poke the liberal bear. So he goes to the US Open. Novak Djokovic was there and, of course, he was unvaccinated. So what does Rodgers do? He posts on Instagram, “#novaxdjokovic,” and he crossed out the Moderna sign in the image with a red marker. The Jets won’t admit this, but I know inside the building they were like, What the hell are you doing? We had this wonderful thing going. Why would you do that? Nobody at the US Open was even talking about Novak’s vaccination status anymore. It wasn’t really an issue being brought up by the tennis media or anybody else. Why did you do that? I think he wanted to test New York’s love for him.

He lucked out because New York was so enthused about the idea of him playing for the Jets and winning games and maybe taking them to a Super Bowl. New York gave him a pass. It went away. Nobody wanted to make too big a deal of it. So that, to me, was a fascinating study in Rodgers. New York, as perhaps the liberal capital of the country, just looked the other way.

One of the oddest parts of the Aaron Rodgers story is his ongoing estrangement from his parents, brothers, and other members of his extended family. You delved into that quite a bit and explored a number of potential explanations for the falling-out. But I have to say, even after reading your book, I still don’t have a clear answer on what prompted him to sever ties. His family seems utterly bewildered by it too. Does anyone besides Rodgers himself have a definitive idea of what caused this? It’s all so opaque.

It’s death by a thousand cuts. That’s what I found. I was waiting for that one moment, that one development that really created the fracture in the family unit. Now, listen, the parents really put a lot of blame on the shoulders of Olivia Munn. I said to them, Well, he hasn’t dated her in seven years, and so she’s no longer in the picture. Why is the estrangement continuing? They claim to not know. There’s a ton of “he said, he said” and “he said, she said” in this. His brothers declined to talk to me.

I think his initial rebellion is against the very conservative evangelical upbringing that he had. There’s a quote from a relative in the book saying that she believed when he went to Cal––a global, liberal institution where you’re exposed to people from all sorts of different cultures and religions and creeds and races––that that’s where Aaron started to basically devise his own thoughts on religion and the world and took it from there.

He said to me that religion today is not a big part of it, but I think fame-chasing is a pretty big part of this. At the end of the day, there’s a lot of complications. Aaron, I think, believes that his brothers have kind of used his fame to further themselves. He doesn’t like that. They don’t agree with that. They didn’t talk to me, but they’ve told other people they think that’s bullshit.

The parents, Ed and Darla, don’t think they did anything wrong. They try to put a lot of the blame on Olivia Munn. I actually don’t think that’s fair. I do think Olivia maybe opened up Aaron’s eyes to the fact that family members were perhaps living a bit too much off of his fame, and he came to that conclusion. They don’t agree with that. They don’t believe that’s true. They blame Olivia Munn for planting that seed, but he made his decision on that. There was an argument that they had [with Munn] over the phone in December of 2014. Ed and Darla said they were blindsided by this phone call from Olivia, right after Aaron had his worst statistical game ever, in terms of passer rating. I asked them if they had made a disparaging remark that might’ve inspired that phone call, and they said they absolutely did not. [Editor’s note: Through a representative, Munn declined to speak with O’Connor for the book, he writes.]

There’s not one clear answer to your question. It’s a great question. What I tried to do with the reporting is sort of lay out how everyone feels and basically leave you with the idea that it doesn’t add up to 10 years of this. It should end. But to boil it down, as best as I can ascertain it, it’s him being put off by fame-chasing, him feeling like he’s been taken advantage of. He said religion’s not a big part of it, but I still think that it has something to do with it. His mother’s very religious, and I think that her positions on premarital sex are very firm. I wrote in the book that, even after he was in the NFL for a while, she was concerned about him making a trip with his girlfriend and staying in the same hotel room with her. So I think there was definitely a rebellion against that, but there’s not one definitive answer to your question.

Rodgers has objected to his family discussing their situation publicly. You had access to his parents and other members of his family for this book, so I’m curious how you think he’ll react to that. Do you think that it might dim the possibility for a reconciliation?

I would never predict how Aaron Rodgers reacts to anything.

I make it a practice to give the subject of my unauthorized biographies the book first. So I went out there [to the Jets’ practice facility in New Jersey] and delivered the book to him. He was practicing, so I gave it to the Jets PR chief.  I put a note in it, and basically the note said, Aaron, I hope you see this book for what it was always intended to be: a fair and honest appraisal of a significant American life. And that’s it. Fairness is really big to me. As long as they think it’s fair, I don’t really care outside of that. He’s not going to love the whole thing.

I did say to him when I sat down with him––and I appreciate that he understood this, because not every athlete would––Do you understand why I have to write about your family? Do you understand that I can’t write a credible biography of you without writing about your family? He did understand that, and there are a lot of superstar athletes who would not understand that. Not even close. So I really appreciated that. Now, there were some things he didn’t want to talk about for public consumption. Obviously, with any subject, you do have background conversations and off-the-record conversations. This process was no different, but he was willing to engage and he did make it a better book on that front. As far as chances for reconciliation, I’m a human being and I’m a father, and his parents helped me quite a bit with this book. I was hoping that, somehow, some way, this would help bring them together.

I’ve heard things, from the father particularly—“You’ve been helpful.” There have been hints that maybe this book will help and has helped. Now, it’s different when it comes out and they get to read it. Somehow I hope that the airing of this will bring them closer together, but I have no idea if it will.

Your subjects have a history of success after your books come out. You wrote a biography on Bill Belichick, and he promptly won a Super Bowl in the following season. Mike Krzyzewski went to the final four after you wrote a book on him. Does this mean we should expect to see the Jets in the Super Bowl?

Also, after my Jeter biography, he had his greatest regular-season day ever. He became the first Yankee to 3,000 hits, and he did it on a home run. But yeah, I have a good feeling about the Jets. I think that the football gods put them through absolute hell last year and that this year it’s going to work out. Now, do I think they’re going to win the Super Bowl? No. I think they’ll have a good season. I think they’ll be in the playoffs. I wouldn’t rule out getting to the Super Bowl and maybe winning it. I think that’s a possibility. One year they are going to win it. That is going to happen. I’m sure the 2004 Red Sox fan base thought something was going to go wrong––and yet it went wrong for everybody else, particularly the Yankees, and they won it all. Everyone assumed something would go wrong with the 2016 Cubs and it didn’t. They won the whole thing. So haunted franchises ultimately break through, and I do think that will happen for the New York Jets.

When you look at their roster, if they’re healthy, they can compete for the Super Bowl. I think what they should focus on is just winning the division. It’s been so long since they’ve won the AFC East. They really need to focus on that and then take it from there. But I’ll say the Jets will go 11-6. They’ll make the playoffs and they’ll lose the AFC Championship Game at Kansas City. How’s that?