Keeping up with Tom Cruise‘s death-defying antics can be difficult, but not if you’re Pom Klementieff. The Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (and Guardians of the Galaxy) scene stealer was introduced to skydiving by her co-star in 2021; since then, she’s jumped out of a plane over 100 times.
“I’ve jumped 104 times since October 2021, when Tom Cruise gifted me skydiving lessons as a wrap gift,” Klementieff told the New York Times. “I love the rush, I love the precision, I love how sharp it makes me. When I jump off a hot-air balloon very early in the morning and the sun is rising and it smells like mist — it’s magical.” After filming in Marvel soundstages for so long, being in Mission: Impossible, with its practical stunts, felt, well, magical.
“We trained very hard with [stunt coordinator] Wade Eastwood. But I had been training for years with a martial artist who taught me how to punch, how to kick, so I had been doing kickboxing, boxing, taekwondo,” she told Variety. “It was my dream to be part of Mission: Impossible. When I was training years ago, sometimes in my schedule, instead of writing ‘martial arts’ or ‘stunt training,’ I would write ‘Mission: Impossible,’ because I wanted to manifest it.”
Good things happen to cool people, and Klementieff is the coolest.
(Via the New York Times and Variety)