‘Venom’ Star Tom Hardy Says Spider-Man Is Not a Hero

As the star of Venom, Tom Hardy will have gone from playing a villain in the DC Universe to being an anti-hero from Marvel Comics, but what about the possibility of him playing a straight-up superhero?

ComicBook.com’s Brandon Davis caught up with Hardy at a press event for Venom, asking if he’d ever play a character like his friend Tom Holland as Spider-Man. And Hardy was surprisingly against the idea.

“He’s a mate, but Spider-Man to me, I look at him and I’m like, that’s a kid who goes *thwip thwip*, and wears lycra. That’s what I see,” Hardy responded, prompting a debate with his co-star.

“There’s nothing heroic about lycra? Is that what you’re saying?” asked Carlton Drake actor Riz Ahmed.

“If you’re a figure skater, yes. If you’re on a bobsled team, yes. I don’t get putting on the lycra to fight crime,” Hardy admitted.

This prompted an argument about the function of lycra in crimefighting, of which Hardy was very skeptical.

“What if you’re Usain Bolt? Usain Bolt wears lycra,” Ahmed added.

“Yes, but it’s not Spider-Man, is it?” asked Hardy.

“So actually there’s an argument that some of the most heroic people on the planet wear lycra, actually.”

“Yeah, for legitimate reasons.”

“But Spider-Man needs to wear lycra because he’s, like, bendy. Listen, Venom’s naked. Not everyone is that comfortable with their body,” Ahmed said, ending the debate on a humorous note.

It seems like Spider-Man and Venom need to go toe to toe and settle this debate with their fists, and hopefully fans get to see that in the near future. Before the film’s rating was revealed, many fans were hoping that the movie would be rated R. But rumors indicated that Sony Pictures wanted to keep the film with a family-friendly rating with the hopes that a future installment could include the Wallcrawler.

Now, Venom producer Avi Arad said the movie was never going to be rated R, possibly teasing plans for the future.

“To me, R is not a consideration,” Arad said. “Can you get away with not R so that other people can see? So that younger people can see? I made an animated show. There was a lot of Venom in there. It was in ’94. There’s no reason to put in violence. To define what Venom is as violence. He’s not. He’s the lethal protector, which is a very different thing. We want to be really true to the comics. Today, in CGI and stuff, we can make Venom bite your head. But we don’t have to show the head going side to side like, ‘that actually tastes good.’ It’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that you finally understood, is that a bad guy? Yeah.”

Venom premieres next Friday on October 5th.