Pom Klementieff — On Higher Ground

Pom Klementieff has that ineffably French je ne sais quoi, when she walks down the red carpets towards premieres of her most recent projects. It doesn’t matter if they were the ones around the world for the last installment of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise; the one at the 76th Cannes Annual Film Festival for The Calm, a BMW-produced short film with Joseph Kosinski and Sam Hargrave behind the camera; or the more recent ones for the first of the two-part Mission: Impossible films wrapping up the 30-year long franchise — she carries each chic and cool outfit effortlessly, seemingly calm and collected as the cameras go off.

Off the red carpets, however, Pom’s demure demeanor opens up to something completely different. Watch enough behind-the-scenes clips on social media from people she’s worked with, and interviews with her castmates talking about her — you come to learn that she’s a ball of energy (much like her character in the Guardians film series), a force to be reckoned with (dead reckoning even, perhaps), already evident as far back as when she was still in theater school. In a way, living up to her name that she inherited from her late mother.

“She told me that she chose the name, because Bom (pronounced as ‘poom’) means ‘spring’ in Korean, and Beom (pronounced as ‘pam’) means ‘tiger’,” explains Pom; coffee in hand, and clad in what she claimed to be her PJs, when its cosmic technicolor palette could pass off as an outfit she’d don for the red carpet.