'Blind Side' Actor Explains Why He Only Met Michael Oher After Filming: 'He Wasn't Available' (Exclusive)

Quinton Aaron, the actor who portrayed Michael Oher in the 2009 movie The Blind Side, is recalling why he never met the real-life football player until years after the film.

As Aaron, 39, spoke with PEOPLE about the new controversy surrounding the film Wednesday, the actor/singer recalled that he only met Oher, now 37, in 2013, at a Chicago autograph-signing event he describes as "the only time he and I had ever come into contact with one another."

"It was something the director had said, you know, 'Michael today isn't how Michael was back then,' " Aaron recalls of why he did not meet him before or during production. "They wanted to kind of portray him more [in the] beginning, kind of like a humble-beginning version of him as opposed to the man he had become, that successful and stuff like that."

Aaron adds that he was told during production on the film that Oher was still busy trying to ensure a place in the NFL.

"[The production] also understood that at the time we were getting ready to film, he was going through [the NFL Combine] and getting ready to try to [make] a push to try to get into the NFL," Aaron says.

"So it wasn't a done deal yet. While we were doing the film, he was doing that process. I think that's why he wasn't available, or at least I thought that's why he wasn't available to be a part of what we had going on."

The Blind Side, which covered Oher's upbringing in Tennessee and road toward playing college football at the University of Mississippi, released in November 2009, about seven months after the Baltimore Ravens selected Oher in that year's NFL Draft.

Reps for John Lee Hancock, who wrote and directed The Blind Side movie, did not respond to PEOPLE's request for comment.

The Blind Side's subjects Oher and Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy returned to the public eye this week as Oher filed a petition alleging Leigh Anne and Sean lied about adopting him. The former NFL player claimed the Tuohys manipulated him into making them his conservators and profited off a falsified version of his life story. They've denied his allegations.

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Aaron, who says he did get to meet Leigh Anne and Sean on the film's set and at subsequent events following The Blind Side's release, says he never got an impression there was animosity between Oher and the Tuohy family.

Lawyers for the family said in a Wednesday press conference that the two parties have been estranged for the last 10 years.

"Everything after the movie was Michael in the NFL and the Tuohys were there at all his games supporting him," Aaron says. "They were out there on the field with him when [the Ravens] won the Super Bowl. So I had pictured it being just like how they were in the story, in the film."

Aaron previously recalled in a 2019 interview with the Dallas Observer that he enjoyed meeting Oher years after The Blind Side hit theaters.

“It was cool,” he said at the time. “We were actually doing an autograph signing in Chicago. We chatted, went out to dinner and everything. He’s a really cool guy.”

Lawyers for the Tuoy family said Wednesday they are willing to release Oher from a conservatorship that Oher's legal filing stated he did not understand "were not adoption papers, or the equivalent of adoption papers" until February of this year.

Oher's reps said Wednesday, "We continue to stand with Michael and the statement he released. We also concur with his attorney, Don Barrett, we believe that justice will be served in a courtroom where cases are based on facts."