Pom Klementieff

Pom Alexandra Klementieff (French: [pɔm klemɑ̃tjɛf]; born 3 May 1986) is a French actress. She is best known for playing Mantis in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2017–2023), and Paris in the final two films of the Mission: Impossible series (2023–2025).

Pom Alexandra Klementieff was born on May 3, 1986, in Quebec City, Canada, to Korean mother Yu Ri Park and Russian-French father Alexis Klementieff. Her grandfather was Russian painter Eugene Klementieff. Her parents chose the name "Pom" because it is similar in pronunciation to the Korean words for both "spring" (봄) and "tiger" (범). Klementieff's father worked in Canada as consul for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Klementieff moved to Kyoto, Japan and then the Ivory Coast before returning to France, settling an hour away from Paris. Klementieff's father died of cancer when she was five, and her mother had schizophrenia and was unable to care for her children, so Klementieff was raised by her paternal uncle and aunt. Her uncle died on her 18th birthday, and her older brother Namou died by suicide seven years later, on her 25th birthday.

Klementieff moved to Paris to study law to appease her aunt, after her uncle's death, but did not find it appealing. She also worked as a waitress and saleswoman in France. She started acting at age 19 at the Cours Florent drama school in Paris. A few months into her education, she won a theater competition and two years of free classes with the school's top teachers.

Klementieff's first professional acting job was the French independent film Après lui (2007), portraying the stepdaughter of the protagonist played by Catherine Deneuve. Filming for her scenes took three days. In one scene, Klementieff was supposed to push someone down a set of stairs but accidentally fell down the stairs herself, and director Gaël Morel kept that shot in the final film.

Her first leading role was in Loup (2009), a French film about a tribe of reindeer herders in the Siberian mountains. During filming, Klementieff stayed in a camp, hours from the nearest village, where temperatures dropped well below zero. She befriended nomads who lived there, worked with real wolves, rode reindeer, and swam with a horse in a lake.

Klementieff made her Hollywood debut in Spike Lee's Oldboy (2013), a remake of the South Korean film of the same name. She portrayed Haeng-bok, the bodyguard of the antagonist played by Sharlto Copley. A fan of the original film, Klementieff heard about the part through Roy Lee, a producer with the remake, and took boxing lessons after learning the role involved martial arts. After showcasing her boxing skills during her audition, Lee asked her to go home and come back wearing a more feminine outfit and make-up, like her character in the film. She contributed some of her own clothes to the character's wardrobe, and trained three hours a day for two months for an on-screen fight with star Josh Brolin. Klementieff herself came up with the name Haeng-bok, Korean for "happiness", after Lee asked her to research possible names for the character.

Klementieff moved to Los Angeles after Oldboy was filmed and began pursuing more Hollywood auditions. She continued taekwondo after the film, and has a purple belt as of the summer of 2014. Her next acting role was the film Hacker's Game (2015), in which she plays a hacker she compared to Lisbeth Salander from the novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Klementieff used her boxing skills again in the film, and due to the movie's low budget, she had to do her own make-up and choose her own wardrobe. It was her idea to dye her hair purple for the role, to which the directors first objected but later acquiesced. In 2017, she appeared in the romance drama Newness and the black comedy-drama Ingrid Goes West.