Recently, /Film’s Jeremy Mathai got to speak with Klementieff about developing the character of Paris. When he asked if she happened to come up with any particular backstory for the character, the actress revealed that she didn’t use such a standard method:
“I don’t really do these things, to be honest with you. I’m just more — I do my little Pom sauce [laughs]. No, but I worked on the feeling of lone wolf, cowboy vibe, rebel. I got inspired by weird videos of the bird, [the] shoebill stork. It’s such a weird prehistoric bird. I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is my character’ [laughs].”
Indeed, when one looks at footage of the mighty, uncanny shoebill stork, it’s easy to see how much character the bird has all by itself. It looks like a refugee from Jurassic Park, something you wouldn’t want to see hanging out in a dark alley blocking your path. Which, not coincidentally, is exactly what Paris does to Ethan Hunt in “Dead Reckoning,” in a moment that’s as intimidating as that sounds.
While Klementieff uses the stork mostly for inspiring Paris’ attitude and predatory movements, she also took some inspiration for the character’s look from the bird, and she mentions in this interview for Rotten Tomatoes. Yet she didn’t need to do much — as she told /Film, “I think I look like the bird a little bit,” and for proof of that, look no further than this article’s header image.