Zelie Bullen

Zelie Bullen (formerly Zelie Thompson) has worked in film and television her entire career. She has over 25 yrs experience with horses and has been lucky enough to work with a large range of both exotic and domestic animals. Zelie was born and raised in the outskirts of Perth in a Charming Rustic Village called "Darlington". Animals surrounded her life from birth but she was made to wait until her 10th birthday to finally get the responsibility of her 'very own' first pony. From a very young age Zelie had planned to become a veterinarian. That was until she discovered a way to chase her true calling which was to "play" with animals and their natural behaviour and then to ultimately train animals for a living. In 1992 after completing a diploma in Agriculture, Zelie left Murdoch University (where she was completing a degree in Biology) to chase her dream of becoming a professional animal trainer and also a stunt performer. She re-located to Queensland's Gold Coast where the entertainment industry was then booming. Warner Brothers Movie World was her first stepping stone before becoming established in the stunt industry in the early 1990's. Stunt work soon engulfed Zelie's life for an 8 year period, however during this time she used every opportunity she could to travel the world and learn more about her heartfelt passion, animal training. From 1996 to 1999 Zelie worked on more than 30 productions in countries as diverse as the US, Namibia and Indonesia. While the bulk of that work was as a stunt woman, her passion remained animals. She took whatever chances she could to learn more about training them. In 2010 Zelie, together with her animal-trainer husband Craig Bullen (of the famous Australian circus family) travelled to England to take on the training of liberty horses. She is rapidly becoming known as the woman who trained 'Abraham', the lead horse in Spielberg's production of the Tony award winning play 'War Horse' (to be released Christmas 2011). Zelie says "At the end of the job Steven Spielberg threw up his arms for a big hug and said 'all of the love that you put into your animals has come out on screen, on my screen and it will be there forever'." In October 2011, Zelie was the subject of the hugely popular Australion TV show "Australia Story".