Josie Ho has been a constant figure in the Hong Kong entertainment industry for over 30 years. She’s an actress, a pop/rock star, a film producer, and a film investor. But when her husband, Conroy Chan, was recovering from a long spell of health troubles, she looked to his doctor and added another position to her resume. As the talent manager of a stable of one, Ho is not only shaping Iranian-Canadian doctor-turned-actor Iman Taheri’s career, but is also launching the next phase of her own career as one half of a screen double act with Taheri and branching out from the horror genre she is known for.
On Monday, Ho is unveiling the new slate of her production company 852 Films at Hong Kong Filmart, an eclectic mix of Cantonese and English-language action crime thrillers, rowdy comedy, romcom, and cultish flicks with a supernatural slant, all of which star herself and Taheri.
Leading the 2025 slate for 852 Films is The Mage, a supernatural crime thriller directed by Hong Kong horror-meister Danny Pang (The Eye), who will also helm the standalone subsequent installment The Mage 2 (filming to start in April 2025), and heist film The Connoisseurs.
Also in the lineup is comedy Macau Redux, an Asian riff of The Hangover to be directed by American helmer Jordan Gertner, which takes place in the world of Ho’s famed ancestry as the daughter of the late Macau casino tycoon Stanley Ho; desert island romcom My Funny Valentine with Malaysian director Bjarne Wong (production scheduled for September 2025) ; and thriller Báthory, to be directed by Matthew David Wilder and inspired by the lore of the 16th century Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory of Ecsed, who was accused of killing over 300 young women and bathing in their blood to preserve her youth.
What all of the above have in common, besides being from the same production company, is that they are all headlined by Ho, 852 Films’ co-founder, and Iman Taheri, a newcomer to the screen who has 1.2 million TikTok followers and used to be a surgeon. He is the first and only artist under 852’s talent management business, with a ten-year contract. The two of them, Ho hopes, will be an enduring double act. “Iman is my muse,” Ho told The Hollywood Reporter.
It all began with the health of Conroy Chan, Ho’s husband and fellow co-founder of 852 Films, which has taken a battering in the last decade. In 2015, Chan was hospitalized for liver cirrhosis, which took years for him to recover. In 2022, when Chan was in Australia, where he grew up, he tore an artery in his gut, causing massive internal bleeding and putting him into a coma for over three weeks. He fortunately survived the ordeal after lengthy hospital stays and the supervision of an army of healthcare specialists. During Chan’s health struggles, he and Ho met Dr. Taheri, who became his live-in doctor at their Hong Kong home.
Instead of taking its toll living under the same roof, Taheri, Ho, and Chan struck up a friendship. “We hang out, and we see his photogenic face,” says Ho, “We see that everything he does is so intellectual. So intelligent, so diligent. He’s a very smart person, we realized. That’s why we didn’t want Iman to leave. I have some agenda for him. One night, the director Danny Pang came to my house for dinner, and Iman was also there. I asked Danny, ‘do you think Iman is goodlooking?” He said, ‘Yes, he is very goodlooking.’ Then he asked if Iman could play one of the roles in our film [The Mage]. So, Iman got his first role there.”
Taheri was delighted with the suggestion, even if it means stepping away from medicine. “[Acting] was my childhood dream,” Taheri explains. “Not a very difficult decision to make, of course. But if you compare these two worlds, I don’t think there is so much difference. Both are very highly demanding professions. Both professions deal with humans, life experiences, and human emotions. They both have healing power. In medicine, we deal with the physical and the body. Being a surgeon is purely physical. Art, and acting particularly, touches the soul even further.”
“One day,” says Ho, “Iman showed us his social media. He was reciting poetry in eight different languages. I asked him why was he always on social media? He told me that he was lonely being a doctor. He did have a wild dream about being an actor. I said, you’ve met the right person. Maybe it was fate that brought us together.”
“I always have this thought,” Ho adds, “that it doesn’t hurt for our industry to have one more cute guy who is macho and smart, who is an intellectual. I already imagined that if I put him through training, he is going to understand the teacher. He won’t waste my money. Iman doesn’t miss a thing.”
Since 852 Films was established almost two decades ago, Ho and Chan, both having careers in front of and behind the camera, had never wanted to sign any actors under contract, until Taheri. “Both Conroy and I had signed with tons of artist management companies. Only Rock Records in Taiwan gave me training. [Ho had her first recording contract, with Rock Records, at the age of 18.] Then I came back to Hong Kong, another music company signed me up, and there was no training. I had to just go and become a singer, do a couple of films with no training, and I felt empty. That’s why I’m constantly going to different cultures to refresh my acting skills.”
With Taheri, Ho is determined to give him what she didn’t received. She put him through formal acting training, music theory studies, singing lessons, and martial arts coaching. She recruited Hong Kong stage actor and comedian Jim Chim to be Taheri’s acting teacher, but she took the classes too and acted opposite him. “I went to the class with him to refresh my acting,” recalls Ho. “Iman would always win. He always learns way faster than I do.”
She also enlisted the help of her own sifu (kung fu teacher), Ah Choi, a long-time member of the stunt team of renowned action choreographer Yuen Woo-ping (The Matrix), who trained Ho and Taheri together. There, Taheri also showed his mettle. “My sifu looked at me and said, ‘Josie, you’re still so slow. Look at Iman. He can do five or six backflips already.’ On wires, he can move like a gymnastics Olympic winner. But I don’t want him to be typecast as a kung fu guy. He can do [kung fu] tricks,” Ho says.
Having no previous acting experience is not a hindrance for Taheri. “I’ve always been prepared for this, mentally,” he says. “I’m a big believer of manifestation. I’ve opened my heart to this opportunity all my life, but somehow, I was more into poetry. Poetry is a constant in my life.” He is also relishing the star-making process. “I can feel like a teenager again, all this training I’m so excited to attend, from singing, acting, kung fu, wirework. I’m like a sponge and ready to learn every detail with my eyes wide.”
In his first acting role in The Mage, Taheri plays the logically-minded chief of police who is at loggerheads with the titular mystic, played by Ho, while investigating a series of mysterious crimes. His fiery and short-tempered character is the polar opposite of the soft-spoken poetry-lover he is in real life, requiring him to summon his acting training and a lot of practice, under Ho’s tutelage. “Whenever Iman was on set,” Ho says, “even though I didn’t have to work that day, I went on the set. I was a dutiful manager. I analyzed his lines with him, what the subtext means, what is called reading between the lines, and things like finding the arc of his character.”
With the whole 852 slate, Ho is tailor-making films for both Taheri and herself as a double act, for not entirely unselfish reasons. Ho explains, “I’m using him to help me to open up to more genres, so that I won’t be stuck. I’m so stuck with horror films right now. I don’t want to make any more films about dead people. I hope The Mage will be the last one. But the directors keep coming to me with the [horror] scripts. Every time I do a film like that, my puppies die. Then my family members get some terminal illness. It’s not funny.”
“Iman and I are going to be teammates in movies, or can even be on screen lovers. I hope someone can come and help me change my genre. That is so hard to find,” she adds. “Iman is my muse. I’m part Persian, Iman is fully Persian. We have something in common in our looks. I can even play his cousin.”
In My Funny Valentine and Macau Redux, Ho and Taheri are going to tackle comedy, which Taheri is not intimated by. “Back in the day, I was known as the funny guy,” he says. “But because of the profession I was in, I had to hold it back. People don’t really appreciate a funny doctor. But now I can be more myself, I can take back this quality.”
Read the full article here
