How Tom Hardy’s Sexiest Man Alive Joke Ended Up in Venom 3: ‘You’re Not Ryan Reynolds!’ (Exclusive)

It’s not personal, Tom Hardy!

The actor, 47, has a bone to pick with the PEOPLE’s Sexiest Man Alive mention in Venom: The Last Dance.

The third and final movie in the superhero franchise has a scene where Hardy’s character Eddie Brock puts on a suit in order to get into a classy casino in Las Vegas. After Eddie cleans up his usually rugged appearance, his alien symbiote Venom (also played by Hardy) makes a comment about how he could win PEOPLE’s coveted award.

While speaking with PEOPLE ahead of the movie’s release, Hardy jokes the dialogue in the scene was to throw him “under the bus.”

Meanwhile, Kelly Marcel, who wrote the screenplay for all three Venom movies and takes on the directing role for the first time on the third one, says it was her “messing around.”

“We just like to have fun with each other occasionally in the script,” she says.

The two recall the details of the scene with Hardy joking that Marcel was up to something nefarious when she wrote it. “That comes from a dig. I know that that was a dig,” he says.

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The Mad Max star continues to explain that his son Louis, 16, is always “bringing up Ryan Reynolds for winning sexiest man of the year awards.”

“He always tells me, ‘Have you ever won sexiest man of the year awards?’ Like, ‘You’re not Ryan Reynolds,’ ” Hardy recalls, noting that he “may have told” Marcel about the comments. “Then you put it on the big screen,” he tells the director.

Marcel insists Hardy is deserving of the title and argues that the line was her “campaigning” for him.

Hardy’s costars Juno Temple and Chiwetel Ejiofor, who make their debuts in the Venom universe for the first time in this movie, agree that Hardy is overdue for the award. “You guys should be throwing it,” the Doctor Strange alum says in a separate interview.

“The way he plays these two people — or one alien and a person — how he intertwined them, and his perspective of a yin and yang within a person, I think that’s very sexy,” Temple says.

“I mean, [he’s a] gorgeous guy,” she adds. “I think he can really own a space. And he looks banging in a suit.”

Venom: The Last Dance picks up right where the previous movie left off and follows Eddie and Venom as they are on the run. “Hunted by both of their worlds and with the net closing in, the duo are forced into a devastating decision that will bring the curtains down on Venom and Eddie’s last dance,” the synopsis teases.