Through her roles, Pom Klementieff has taken us through action-packed scenes, both in and out of this world.
Pom Klementieff, real-life badass, has just leapt out of a hot air balloon thousands of feet above the valley of Perris, California. Against the bright stripes of the balloon, Klementieff appears to be falling upward, almost levitating, her eyes closing in transcendence. But she was fully in the present, aware of every moment. The balloon had drifted beyond the designated drop zone, and Klementieff had to make a quick decision once she pulled the parachute.
“You sometimes have to improvise with the landing. You don’t want to land on a building, or on a road, or on wires with electricity. I was like, okay, this feels yummy, this feels not yummy,” she tells Vogue Philippines several days after the shoot. “You have to choose wisely, you know.” Klementieff landed safely on a field, the ground still soft and wet with morning dew, or rosée du matin, as she calls it in French. The moon was still visible in the early morning sky, and she pulled out her phone to take a video before calling to be picked up for the next jump. Klementieff was just getting started.
Cinematographer Craig O’Brien, who filmed Tom Cruise’s nerve-wracking high altitude, oxygen assisted jump in Mission: Impossible-Fallout, continued to photograph Klementieff as she did a couple more jumps from the Skyvan, a boxy, 1960s-era aircraft used by the skydiving operation Skydive Perris. “We were blessed with beautiful weather and Pom made it all too easy by performing on the jumps just as planned,” O’Brien says.
In one of the photographs, Klementieff is freefalling diagonally, hurtling towards the earth like a comet. This is a technique called tracking, where the body and arms form a straight line, a position that allows the skydiver to maneuver through the air. “As if you’re flying like Superman, but your hands are in the back,” she describes. “And then you can follow other skydivers in the sky. It feels like [being] dolphins in the ocean.”
Klementieff is rapturous when she talks about skydiving: “It’s poetic to see Earth from above and just be floating, having this sense of weightlessness. It’s very special and beautiful.” Her co-star Tom Cruise is the one responsible for getting her obsessed with skydiving, gifting her with lessons after wrapping Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning, where she plays Paris, an assassin who gleefully plows through the streets of Rome in an armored Hummer.
“Tom came the last day when I was about to get my license. And then I got my license, and we did nine jumps together, and one high altitude one, and it was so much fun,” she says. “And then he flew his own plane back home.” As one does, after an entire day of jumping out of planes. For her birthday, Cruise gifted Klementieff with a parachute rig customized with artwork by James Jean: “It is one of my most precious possessions.”
Tellingly, Klementieff has earned nicknames like “Pom Cruise” and the “Pominator” from her team for her high-velocity pastimes. Like Cruise, she does her own stunts and fight scenes, ever since her Hollywood debut in Spike Lee’s remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, which shows off her martial arts training as a silent but deadly henchwoman in heels. In the terminal installment of Mission: Impossible-The Final Reckoning, which is released theatrically this May, Klementieff returns as Paris, who is now embedded in Ethan Hunt’s group of operatives after she was stabbed by her former boss Gabriel, Hunt’s oldest enemy. Together, they try to take down the world’s greatest threat, a sentient yet evil AI entity that wants to control everything.
“I have some incredible fight scenes in it,” Klementieff says of her expanded role, a redemptive arc that audiences are anticipating. Her enigmatic performance as a killer with minimal dialogue revealed how much could be said with an insane glint or single tear. “I would say that the stunt double is extremely bored,” she says with a smile. “Stunt people keep us safe, and I respect them so much, but yeah, for my scenes, I do almost everything.”
“It’s poetic to see Earth from above and just be floating, having this sense of weightlessness. It’s very special and beautiful.”
– POM Klementieff
Before joining the Mission: Impossible franchise, Klementieff was cast as Mantis in two volumes of the Marvel franchise Guardians of the Galaxy, where she played an adorable insectoid with empathic powers and Dave Bautista as a teammate. But the killing game seems to follow Pom, who then appeared as the vengeful bosslady of a hitman-matching platform in the gore-com The Killer’s Game, this time with Bautista as her archnemesis.
Klementieff still keeps us guessing, as she stars in the upcoming thriller Mi Amor by French director Guillaume Nicloux. “It was exactly what I wanted to do at the moment, you know? And I love his movies, and it’s a beautiful role, with things that I’ve never done before.” While she can’t divulge more, she says that emotionally, it’s very different. “The funny part is, if there’s an action scene or something and I can’t fight back, it can be kind of frustrating. But you have to stay in character. You can’t punch the person back,” she laughs. “It’s what I love about my job, to be able to do projects that are completely different from one another.”
There isn’t a specific role or genre that she’s after, however. “It’s about working with great directors that I admire. That’s my goal,” she says. “It’s working with a director who has a vision. And it’s such a collaborative process, so it’s not even just the director, it’s the whole team, because everyone has to be in sync to create a great movie.” Klementieff recounts how she would be on the Mission: Impossible set even when she was not part of a scene, just to observe the process unfold and witness how the months of preparation played out in front of the camera. “The way Tom and McQ talk about [the film] is like a master class in movie making.”
For the French actor, creating a character means going on an adventure with her collaborators. With Mission: Impossible, this involved many discussions with director Christopher McQuarrie, with Tom Cruise, and costume designer Jill Taylor. Klementieff knew what she wanted from her wardrobe, and that was to be able to really move. “We chose certain outfits that you could do a high kick with, that was not too restrictive. And I didn’t want to wear heels, because I wanted to do all the fighting myself. Sometimes it looks a little funny when an actress does a lot of action with heels, because you can’t do that in real life. It can work for certain movies, but I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to be grounded. I wanted to be ready to fight.”
Paris, before her pivot towards good, was a sword-wielding fighting machine who relentlessly, yet stealthily stalked her prey. Klementieff drew inspiration for the way Paris moves from an odd-looking prehistoric bird called the shoebill stork, a silent, solitary creature with a menacing death glare and a mating call that sounds like a machine gun. “So that became part of her. I don’t really take myself too seriously,” she shares, explaining that there is no specific process or method to how she embodies a character. “You read the script, dream about the role. Sometimes I think of music or a playlist that just makes you think of the character or specific moments. I always use my personal experience, and so I root myself in this truth that is inside of me.”
What Klementieff does take seriously are her various athletic interests that fall in the realm of extreme sports. Besides skydiving, she counts riding motorcycles as one of her other passions, and recently she has learned how to snowboard. “I love pushing myself. I wouldn’t call myself a great snowboarder, yet. I’m still learning, but that’s what I love, to choose to do something, and to kind of suck at the beginning, and then get better and improve.”
Horseback riding first opened Klementieff to a world of adventure. Though she started riding ponies as a young girl and learned proper English riding as a teenager, she truly comes alive in the wide-open spaces of Colorado where she can gallop for hours across the endless terrain. Her IG videos show her riding in checkered shirts and fringed chaps, looking every bit the cowgirl she is meant to be. She says that the experience of being in nature on horseback is magical, and wild animals aren’t afraid of you because they recognize you as part of their world.
Though it may seem she’s off on one thrill-seeking exploit after another, Klementieff is anything but reckless. “I train in a safe way, with the right teacher and doing it with patience and attention to detail. I like to take the time to properly learn.” She shares that she got her scuba diving license recently, and did experience a bit of fear during the lessons when a childhood trauma of being in the water came back to her. “A lot of it is just convincing your brain that everything is going to be okay. And breathing exercises. It’s like taming a little animal in your brain.”
Things have been turning out more than okay for Pom Klementieff, who for a period struggled to find work after Oldboy: “I was not getting auditions, or when I was getting them, I was not booking them,” she recalls. “It was scary, I remember those times, and they’re part of you, but I got out.” She got out and entered a portal that led to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but she got up because she knew that’s just what she had to do.
“I used to fall a lot, and that can hurt, but it’s a metaphor for life, too. You fall and you just get back up,” she says. “Like when you ride horses, you fall off the horse and then you get back on the horse. You can’t walk away. You learn from it: I’m not going to make that mistake again, ever.”
They say that skydiving defies all expectations for the uninitiated. For those with no love of stomach-dropping roller coasters and vertigo-inducing heights, the thought of whooshing down the blue yonder at 125 mph is, quite frankly, terrifying. But skydivers describe a completely different sensation once that first leap of faith is made and terror turns into complete calm. The air beneath your body holds you up, an invisible cradle that lets you navigate through the sky, like swimming in the wind. The human body, for a brief blissful moment, is granted the freedom of flight.
As of this photoshoot, Klementieff has made 233 jumps. That’s 233 times she has chosen to skydance, to spin, to tumble through the atmosphere, each plunge a wide-open embrace of life and all that it has to give.
By AUDREY CARPIO. Photographs by GIEL DOMEN & KENNETH VAN DE VELDE. Skydive Photographer CRAIG O’BRIEN. Styling by DANYUL BROWN. Fashion Director PAM QUIÑONES. Makeup Artist: Pricilla Pae. Hair Stylist: Marcia Lee. Casting: Jill Demling. Executive Producer: Anz Hizon. Producer: Alexey Galetskiy. Photo Team: Laura Berrou. Set Design: Ivan Fomin. Set Team: Andrik Aruti. Styling Team: Nik Avn Dalen. Tailor: Oxana Sumenko. Video: Giel Domen & Kenneth Van De Velde. Production Team: Ivan Shentalinskiy, Grace Thiti. Skydive Digital Tech: Bran Moats. Skydive Safety: Scott Smith. Shot on location at AGP West and Skydive Perris. Special Thanks to Nars Cosmetics, Skydive Perris, Whitney Tancred, and Luc Brinker.
