Pom Klementieff plays innocence so straight that rudeness bounces off it, and menace so quietly that a look does the work of a speech. She is a fine supporting player in enormous films, and nobody has yet built one around her.
Fi1m perspective
Drax tells Mantis she is hideous, and she thanks him. That exchange, in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017), is the whole of what Pom Klementieff does in the part: she plays an alien empath with no defences at all, who takes every insult as information and is grateful for it. It made us laugh harder than we care to admit, and then feel slightly ashamed, because she plays the thank-you without a flicker, and the joke only works if she means it. Dave Bautista supplies the rudeness. She supplies the innocence, and it is the harder job.
By Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) the innocence has worn into patience. James Gunn sends Drax and Mantis off together whenever the plot stalls, and it works every time; Klementieff has found a tiredness in the character that is funnier than the wide eyes were. It is a small performance in a loud film, and it is one of the reasons the loud film is bearable.
She came to it sideways. Small French parts from 2007, a lead in Loup (2009), then a move to Los Angeles and a Hollywood debut as Haeng-bok in Spike Lee's Oldboy (2013), a part that used her fighting rather than her face. Gunn cast her as Mantis and has directed her in five films. There was a supporting turn as Lexis in Uncut Gems (2019), and then Christopher McQuarrie took her for the Mission: Impossible films, where she plays Paris, an assassin, opposite Tom Cruise. She trained in boxing, taekwondo and kickboxing, and she has said she is drawn to characters who fight, literally or otherwise. Directors have taken her at her word.
Paris is the other Klementieff. In Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) she hardly speaks; Morales's Gabriel gets the slow walks and the lines about fate, and she gets more done with a look than he manages with a speech. It is a performance built from posture and timing, with the fights saying what the dialogue does not. In The Final Reckoning (2025) the part gave her less and left us with less to say about her, which is a pity, because she had earned more.
So far, then, two faces: the open one and the shut one, both in films with a dozen leads and a plot that stops every twenty minutes for a briefing. The parts have been small and the films have been huge. Start with Vol. 2, for the dinner table, and Dead Reckoning, for the look. Then wait, as we are, for someone to give her a film with fewer than eight people in the poster.
Biography
Pom Alexandra Klementieff is a French actress. She was born on 3 May 1986 in Québec City, Canada, to a Korean mother and a Russian-French father who worked as a diplomat for the French government.
She trained at the Cours Florent in Paris after briefly studying law. Klementieff is best known for playing Mantis in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, beginning with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) and continuing through Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023). She also portrays the assassin Paris in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) and Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025).
