Klementieff was born in Quebec City, Canada, on May 3 1986 to Korean mother Yu Ri Park and Russian-French father Alexis Klementieff,[7][8] who was working there as a consul with the government of France. She is a French citizen and does not have Canadian citizenship due to jus soli not applying to children of diplomats.[9][10][11] Her grandfather was Russian painter Eugene Klementieff.[12]
Her parents chose the name "Pom" because it is similar in pronunciation to the Korean words for both "spring" (봄) and "tiger" (범).[10] They lived in Japan and Ivory Coast before settling in France.
Klementieff's father died of cancer when she was five, and her mother had schizophrenia and was unable to care for her children,[10] so Klementieff was raised by her paternal uncle and aunt.[11] Her uncle, whom she described as "like [her] second father", died on her 18th birthday, and her older brother Namou died by suicide seven years later, on her 25th birthday.[10][13] Klementieff briefly studied law in an undergraduate capacity after her uncle's death to appease her aunt, but did not find it appealing. She also worked as a waitress and saleswoman in France.[10] 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.[14]
Career
2007–2012: Early career
Klementieff at the 2018 Brussels Comic Con
Klementieff's first professional acting job was the French independent film Après lui (2007), portraying the stepdaughter of the protagonist played by Catherine Deneuve.[11] 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.[14]
2013–present: Breakthrough
Klementieff made her Hollywood debut in Spike Lee's Oldboy (2013), a remake of the South Korean film of the same name.[14][15] 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.[11][10] She contributed some of her own clothes to the character's wardrobe,[11] and trained three hours a day for two months for an on-screen fight with star Josh Brolin.[11][15] Klementieff herself came up with the name Haeng-bok, Korean for "happiness", after Lee asked her to research possible names for the character.[11][14]
Klementieff moved to Los Angeles after Oldboy was filmed and began pursuing more Hollywood auditions.[11][14] She continued taekwondo after the film, and has a purple belt as of the summer of 2014.[11] 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.[14] It was her idea to dye her hair purple for the role, to which the directors first objected but later acquiesced.[11] In 2017, she appeared in the romance drama Newness and the black comedy-drama Ingrid Goes West.
^"Qui es-tu Pom Klementieff?/Who are you Pom Klementieff?". Première (in French). France. 7 July 2012. Archived from the original on 1 January 2018. Retrieved 1 January 2018. Miss Klementieff est née au Québec le 3 mai 1986, d'un père russe et d'une mère coréenne./Miss Klementieff was born in Quebec on 3 May 1986 to a Russian father and a Korean mother.Additional on 1 January 2018.
^"The May 7 Edition". The Sydney Morning Herald. 7 May 2023. Archived from the original on 25 August 2023. Retrieved 25 August 2023.
^ abcdefHan, Steve (November 2013). "Korean French Actress Pom Klementieff Makes US Debut in 'Oldboy' Remake". KoreAm. Archived from the original on 14 July 2014. Retrieved 5 July 2014. So I told [filmmaker Spike Lee], my father died when I was 5. My mother, she is schizophrenic, so she couldn't take care of me and my brother, who died by suicide a few months before the audition [for Lee's remake of Oldboy].
^ abcdef"Q&A with Pom Klementieff". Anthem Magazine (Interview). Interviewed by Chang, Kee. 2 July 2013. Archived from the original on 7 January 2014. Retrieved 5 July 2014.
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