Pom Klementieff

The Discipline of the Strike

Pom Klementieff spent months training in martial arts at a gym in Los Angeles before landing a secure role in the American industry. In 2013, Spike Lee was looking for someone who could fight convincingly for his version of Oldboy, and she auditioned with the taekwondo she had learned at home. It was her first real foray into the American market after a few quiet years in French cinema.

She was born in Quebec in 1986 because of her father's diplomatic work, but her passport is French. Klementieff's childhood was marked by a nomadic instability that took her from Japan to Ivory Coast before settling in Paris. When she was five, she lost her father, and that early loss shaped a hardened character that she would later bring to her most physical roles.

She studied at the Cours Florent drama school almost by accident.

In 2007 she made her debut in the French drama Après lui alongside Catherine Deneuve. But the European industry never quite found a clear place for her, and she decided her path lay in international action productions. Because Klementieff did not want to be just a supporting face in low-budget art-house dramas.

Anonymity Behind the Antennae

In 2017, the general public came to know her face but not her real features. James Gunn chose her to play Mantis in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and the daily makeup process took over two hours. That role demanded a mix of total innocence and a physical ability the actress had already mastered after years in the gym. She signed a contract that tied her to Marvel for six years and several large-scale films.

And the gamble paid off.

She appeared in Avengers: Infinity War in 2018 and in Avengers: Endgame in 2019. During that time, many people on the street didn't recognize her without the antennas and the skin altered by the practical effects. But in the offices of the major studios, her name began to come up for projects where physical risk was the absolute priority.

In 2019, she appeared in an episode from the fifth season of Black Mirror titled Striking Vipers. There, she once again explored choreographed fighting in a virtual video game environment. It was a reminder that her combat training was her greatest professional tool compared with actresses with a more conventional profile.

The Physical Risks in Rome

Christopher McQuarrie brought her in to join the Mission: Impossible franchise after seeing her skills on social media. In 2023, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One was released, in which Klementieff played Paris, an assassin who barely spoke. She performed many of her own stunts and motorcycle chases through the streets of Rome.

Her character was designed to be an unstoppable force of nature. During the filming of one of the fight scenes, she asked Tom Cruise to really hit her in the stomach to make the shot more realistic. Cruise refused for safety reasons, but the gesture defines the French actress's work ethic.

She doesn't go for the comfort of the green screen.

In 2025 she will return to the screen in the eighth installment of Paramount's espionage franchise. Filming for these productions usually stretches over months due to the technical complexity of the real action scenes. Klementieff balances these big productions with a private life kept away from the spotlight of the top-tier European film festivals.

Her pay for her latest collaborations with Marvel exceeded several million dollars per appearance. In 2024, the actress kept a low media profile while preparing new extreme action projects in the United States. The total budget of her latest film in 2023 came to 291 million dollars.