Set Life: Atlanta casting agent puts animal actors on set with Anne Hathaway in Atlanta-shot sci-fi film

In the film The End of Oak Street, the scene-stealing Australian cattle dog character, Starbuck, was cast and trained by Animal Casting Atlanta’s owner, Greg Tresan.

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Like a stunt double of sorts, the role of an animal in a feature film is sometimes played by more than one actor. This was the case for the character of Starbuck, an Australian cattle dog with a demanding role as the family dog and protector in the summertime film The End of Oak Street.

The dinosaur sci-fi tale, which is still playing in select theaters, stars Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor and was shot on location in Southwest Atlanta’s Wisteria Gardens neighborhood, as well as on sound stages at Electric Owl Studios in DeKalb County.

The high-energy, action-packed role of Starbuck was crafted with the help of Greg Tresan, owner of Animal Casting Atlanta, who put the animal actors playing Starbuck in action.

“Our first dog, Buzzy from St. Louis, had been in the Marvel miniseries Echo, and he was wonderful,” says Tresan, who also owns Atlanta Dog Works in Ball Ground, a kennel operation that runs alongside the casting business.

Tresan’s business is co-owned by his wife, Carol, and together they work with a stable of professional animal trainers.

When they were tasked with casting Starbuck several years back before production began on The End of Oak Street, they once again turned to Buzzy.

In pre-production, though, Tresan got a call from one of his trainers saying that the screen-time-intensive role of Starbuck would best be played by a pair. So Tresan would need to find another Australian cattle dog — a Buzzy look-alike, essentially — to share the work of the role.

“So I immediately started making calls, and the day we started filming at the studio, I had two other dogs there for auditions before the crew call,” Tresan says. “One of them was local, but that was not going to work because cattle dogs are not easy, and they can be a little nervy, and this dog was too nervy.”

The second dog, a seasoned show dog from Massachusetts named Brisket, was in town with his owner, competing in a dog show in Perry.

“He’s a very good show dog,” Tresan notes.

He immediately established a strong rapport with both Brisket and his owner, Tresan reports, and, within five minutes, he taught the dog to bark on cue from a hand signal.

“He looked enough like Buzzy that we were able to convince the production that this is the right move. And we had Brisket on set the next day,” he says.

Even though Brisket had never been on a film set before, as a top show dog, he was routinely in performance environments and around large numbers of people, which helped the dog manage the busyness of a film set.

“We did some rudimentary training on him for film work, and he did a great job,” Tresan says. “He stepped right into it, and it’s a little bit of a Cinderella story.”

How did Tresan get into the business of casting and working with animal actors in the first place?

In the late 1980s, more than three decades before he cast and trained Buzzy and Brisket to jointly play the role of Starbuck, Tresan was studying and shooting for a career in the music industry — until a special dog changed his path.

“Back in the late 1980s, I had one of the best Frisbee dogs in the world, Jumping Jess, and [we] were touring all over the country,” Tresan says. In live performance after live performance, including half-time shows at Major League Baseball games, Tresan and Jess performed before enthusiastic crowds who soon became fans.

One day, Tresan was approached by a film producer.

“The producer came up to me and gave me their card and said, ‘We’d like to put you in a commercial,’” he recalls.

“It was a Little Debbie snack cake commercial, and we were playing Frisbee on the beach in San Francisco,” Tresan describes.

And he adds, “They liked my dog, so they kept hiring me.”

Additional commercial work followed for Toys ‘R’ Us and other brands, and, soon after, offers for television gigs began rolling in.

“We did the [Pepsi-sponsored] video release for Home Alone and the dog putting its paws up to its cheeks — that was Jess,” Tresan says. “So that’s how it really got started, and it just kind of grew from there. She just happened to be outstanding.”

Tresan also realized that while he had a talent for training his own dog, he didn’t know much about training other people’s animals — and other people were beginning to ask him to train them.

“So I took on an apprenticeship with a trainer in Connecticut who was a professor at Yale,” he says. “She was an author who had written books about dogs, and she was really involved with litigation involving pit bulls as an expert witness.”

The Connecticut trainer and Yale professor also operated a kennel.

“I took a job at the kennel to supplement my income [as I learned to become an animal trainer], and so I learned how a kennel works,” Tresan says.

“I moved to Atlanta in 1992 and established Atlanta Dog Works [kennel] in 1993,” he says. “Then we added the DBA for animal casting [Animal Casting Atlanta].”

More than dogs, the move reflected the couple’s casting and training services for all animals for film and TV.

As Tresan says, “My wife, an equestrian and animal lover, likes to say we do everything from ferrets to parrots.”

Before The End of Oak Street, some of the couple’s work included casting a range of animals for the first five series of The Walking Dead.

The pair also cast animals for the third and fourth Hunger Games movies. “Those were cats and horses, largely,” Tresan adds.

By the time he cast Buzzy and Brisket as Starbuck, Tresan had gone through a personal drama from which he didn’t back down — malignant thyroid cancer that had metastasized.

Tresan shares, “After we started casting for The End of Oak Street, I was diagnosed. And I had to have surgery. So right at the outset of the movie … I had 70 stitches in my neck.”

With the support and help of Carol and his crew, he continued to work on the film.

In his off time from movie sets, he also continued his passion as a sprint car racer, racing a vintage BMW.

Tresan, who’s now in remission, says, “I was highly competitive all that year, [2024] and I never missed a race … although it definitely took me back.”

In 2025, Tresan came back to win the Southeast Championship, all while working on The End of Oak Street.

He adds, “It was a good movie, and I’m sorry it didn’t do better at the box office.” And yet, Tresan believes it will have a strong streaming life.

When asked what he thinks about the sluggish state of the film industry nationwide, and especially in Atlanta where his business is located, Tresan remains optimistic overall.

“I think there are a lot of contributing factors to what’s going on right now in the film industry, [but] we’re still seeing substantial productions come through. We did [series] Cape Fear last year, and we’re working on a big movie right now,” he says.  

An optimist, he proffers this belief about the film scene overall: “It’s cyclic.”

Like the performance of dog actor Brisket, who worked alongside Buzzy as Starbuck in The End of Oak Street — as well as Tresan’s own bout with cancer — he’s capable of manifesting more Cinderella stories.

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Carol Badaracco Padgett is an Atlanta-based freelance writer who focuses on film and television, the automotive industry, architectural design and collaborative storytelling projects.