As one of People magazine’s 2025 Sexiest Men Alive, Christopher Meloni participated in a Q&A. In the interview, he refers to his Law & Order: Special Victims Unit character Elliot Stabler uniting romantically with Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson.

“For [Olivia] Benson and [Elliot] Stabler to get together, it’s hard! Hard,” Meloni says. “Am I blushing?” Christopher has been on the NBC series since 1999 until 2011. His reprised Elliott for the Law & Order spinoff series, Organized Crime, in 2021. “Organized Crime Stabler is sexier. There’s a certain fine wine quality to him.”

Christopher Meloni is one of PEOPLE’s 2025 Sexiest Men Alive

Christopher answered the question on whether the show’s stars would end up together, “Oh, I have the energy, just not the time. They should ride off into the sunset.”

The best part of playing Elliot is the familiarity. “It is a comfortable place. It is a place I know very well, and yet I’m not tired of doing. It’s good storytelling with people that I like to work with. When they asked me to do OC, I’d never had this feeling. It was a little bit like going home.”

Christopher is like Elliot, but there also are differences. “Neither of us is quite as patient as we’d like to be. But I think most people have this: When you see obvious injustice, that thing wells up inside you and you look around like, ‘Am I the only one who sees it? This is unfair.’ And it almost invariably happens to the ones without a voice.”

Unlike Elliot, Christopher doesn’t have a superhero complex. “He has a very, very strict straight moral fiber to him, and he acts upon that. He’s chosen a profession where he gets to do his closest imitation of being a superhero. I don’t have that. I don’t activate that way.”