LIMIT LESS

Through her roles, POM KLEMENTIEFF has taken us through action-packed scenes, both in and out of this world. AUDREY CARPIO talks to the actress about the thrill of the fight and the joys of flight.

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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 lit by a plume of fire, 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.