Pom Klementieff, born May 3, 1986, is a French actress. She was trained at the Cours Florent drama school in Paris and has appeared in such movies as Loup, Sleepless Night, and Hacker’s Game. She currently plays the role of Mantis in the movie Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Avengers: Infinity War. Take a look below for 24 more interesting and awesome facts about Pom Klementieff.

1. Klementieff was born in Quebec City, Canada, to a Korean mother and French-Russian father, who was working there as a consul with the French government.

2. She had a brother who committed suicide.

3. Her parents chose the name “Pom” because it’s similar in pronunciation to the Korea words for both “spring” and “tiger.”

4. Klementieff lived in Canada for one year before her family traveled extensively due to her father’s job.

5. Her family lived in Japan and the Ivory Coast, before settling in France.

6. Klementieff has stated that travelling at an early age gave her a “gypsy soul.”

7. Klementieff’s father died of cancer when she was 5 years old, and her mother was schizophrenic and unable to care for children, so Klementieff was raised by her paternal uncle and aunt.

8. Her uncle, whom she described as “like my second father,” died on her 18th birthday.

9. She briefly attended law school after her uncle’s death to appease her aunt but didn’t find the career path appealing.

10. She worked as a waitress and saleswoman in France.

11. Klementieff started acting at the age of 19 at the Cours Florent drama school in Paris. A few months into her education, she won a theater competition that awarded her free classes for two years with the school’s top teachers.

12. Her first professional acting job was the French independent movie Apres lui, portraying the stepdaughter of the protagonist played by Catherine Deneuve.

13. During one scene in Apres lui, Klementieff was supposed to push someone down a set of stairs but accidentally fell down the stairs herself, and director Gael Morel kept that shot in the final film.

14. Her first leading role was in Loup, a French movie about a tribe of reindeer herders in the Siberian mountains.

15. During the filming of Loup, Klementieff stayed in a camp, hours from the nearest village, where temperatures dropped well below zero.

16. During the filming of Loup, Klementieff befriended nomads who lived there, worked with real wolves, rode reindeer and swam with a horse in a lake.

17. She made her Hollywood debut in Spike Lee’s Oldboy, a remake of the South Korean movie of the same name.

18. A fan of the original Oldboy movie, Klementieff heard about the part through Roy Lee, a producer with the remake, and took boxing lessons after learning that the role involved martial arts.

19. After showing off her boxing skills during the audition of Oldboy, Lee asked her to go home and come back wearing a more feminine outfit and make-up, like her character in the movie.

20. While filming Oldboy, Klementieff contributed some of her own clothes to the character’s wardrobe, and trained three hours a day for two months for an on-screen fight with star Josh Brolin.

21. Klementieff came up with the name Haeng-Bok, Korean for “happiness,” herself after Spike Lee asked her to research possible names for the character in Oldboy.

22. Klementieff moved to Los Angeles after Oldboy was filmed and began pursuing more Hollywood auditions.

23. After finishing with Oldboy, she moved on to Hacker’s Game, in which she plays a hacker that she compared to Lisbeth Salander from the novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

24. Due to the low budget of Hacker’s Game, Klementieff had to do her own make-up and choose her own wardrobe.