Why The Bachelorette star Ali Oetjen isn’t ready to date seven months after shock split
After relocating to Queensland and moving into a ‘beautiful treehouse’, Ali Oetjen has revealed why she is not yet looking for love following her split from Taite Radley.
Confidential
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Ali Oetjen has put roots down in Queensland, moving into her own home on the Sunshine Coast.
The former Bachelorette relocated from Victoria to live in her parents’ Maleny house at the end of last year following her split from Taite Radley, who she met on the dating show.
This month Oetjen has moved into her own rental home as she continues to scout for a permanent home to buy.
“I found a beautiful treehouse to call my own,” Oetjen said.
“It was really good living with my parents, having stress-free friendly faces to come home to. They were a great support network.
“It’s a whole new world now. I’m into the next chapter. I couldn’t be happier.”
While she has moved on from Radley, Oetjen said she wasn’t ready to return to dating, saying “I’m just doing me at the moment”.
She had driven from her shared home with Radley when she filmed SAS Australia late last year and upon returning to Queensland agreed to appear on Celebrity Holey Moley, which was filmed at Redland City in October and screens on Channel 7 tonight.
“I remember getting the call, and they were explaining to me how it was putt putt golf and I was like I love golf … but I don’t see how it can be TV. Then they explained how it was like Ninja Warrior.
“I was like sign me up, I’ve just done SAS I can do anything. I really felt invincible.”
“Then a rubber duck got me in the water.”
THE SCOOP
The Queensland Conservatorium of Music is the gift that keeps giving for Kate Miller-Heidke.
The acclaimed singer, a graduate of the prestigious Griffith University music school, was presented with an honorary doctorate for service to the arts during a ceremony at the Brisbane Exhibition and Convention Centre last night.
Miller-Heidke studied a Bachelor of Music at the Conservatorium on full scholarship in the early 2000s before launching a successful career in music and theatre that includes five Helpmann awards, 17 ARIA nominations and five albums.
“It’s a surprise and a thrill to be recognised in this way,” she said of the doctorate.
“The Conservatorium looms very large for me in terms of my past and my development as an artist. It’s a real honour.
The singer also met her partner and longtime collaborator Keir Nuttall at the Conservatorium, with the pair going on to write the hit musical Muriel’s Wedding as well as Miller-Heidke’s song Zero Gravity, which she performed while representing Australia at the Eurovision Song Contest.
“Keir was studying jazz guitar and I was studying classical voice – at the time we joked we were like Romeo and Juliet because we came from two different tribes,” she said.
The couple share a four-year-old son, Ernie, and made the shift back to Brisbane from Melbourne in November.
LEADING MAN
By the time Brisbane actor Ben O’Toole was leading a movie on the Gold Coast, he had a bank of knowledge from Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson and Chris Hemsworth to draw from.
The 31-year-old, who starred in recently-released comedy horror flick Bloody Hell, got his film start on The Water Diviner with Crowe before filming roles in Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge and 12 Strong alongside Hemsworth in 2018.
“Being a beneficiary of their experience is awesome because each of them had a very different thing to teach me, indirectly,” O’Toole told Confidential.
“Mel taught me a lot of acting things, he’s just a fount of knowledge. He’s the reason I became an actor, and Russell Crowe’s communication with actors was phenomenal.
“Watching Chris Hemsworth on a set, he really taught me how to lead a film. He was just phenomenal during that film because it did have its issues.”
He added: “A lot of people were nervous throughout the shooting and then you’d look to Chris and it was like nothing was wrong at all. He was one of the producers so he must have been feeling it as well, but he was really an incredible leader in that and I thought to myself, ‘If I’m ever number one on a call sheet, I’m going to behave like him’.”
O’Toole, who left Brisbane at 19 to study at WAAPA in Perth, filmed the lead role in Bloody Hell on the Gold Coast in 2019, the year after 12 Strong hit cinemas.
His character suffers through various tortures, including hanging from the rafters by his arms.
“I felt prepared,” he said.
“I think I was hanging from that rafter for like 10 solid days of shooting. We had a lot of safety words, like pineapple. In the middle of the scene, you’re just going “Pineapple! Pineapple!’”.
O’Toole had filmed Halifax: Retribution and returned to Los Angeles early last year where he signed with a new manager and met them for a beer in March to toast to a promising year.
“It was like “here we go”, and then I think the following day LA and the whole world shut down,” he said.
The actor decided to return to Australia and quarantined in a campervan in the backyard of his parent’s home before going through a year of uncertainty about the future of acting, during which he signed up to a personal training course.
“Workwise last year was just terrible. It was quite a struggle. I was very confused for a long time about how and when we’d go back to work,” he said.
He landed a role on star-studded new Australia drama series Amazing Grace, which airs this Wednesday, just in time to pull out of the course.
“I was very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time,” he said. “I’m attached to a few projects now; it’s just a game of seeing what will go first.”
BABY JOY
Brisbane Broncos player Jamayne Isaako has a new supporter for the 2021 season.
The 24-year-old fullback and his partner Abby Sutherland welcomed their daughter, Iylah Isaako, early Tuesday at Mater Mother’s Hospital in Brisbane, just two weeks before the NRL season is due to begin.
Iylah, born weighing 3kg, is a baby sister to their son Isaiah, two.
“I already love you … Thank you to my baby mama for giving me yet another beautiful blessing,” Isaako wrote to social media announcing the birth.
The Broncos will launch their season with cocktail party on Friday ahead of the first round the following week.
IT’S A WRAP
After a year of turbulence due to the global pandemic, workers on Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis production finally got the chance to celebrate the finished product.
The crew Warner Bros. movie enjoyed a wrap party at Miami Marketta on the Gold Coast last Sunday, where they watched short clips from the film.
The embattled production has been filming at Village Roadshow Studios and on location on the Gold Coast since September, when star Tom Hanks could return to Australia from the US.
It had been shut down since March, after Hanks contracted COVID-19 one week before filming was due to begin and had to return to the US.
Filming had already been slightly delayed due to localised flooding last February.
Warner Bros. announced last month it had postponed the film’s released from this November to June, 2022.
GUESS WHO DON’T SUE
Sometimes separating art from life is more than difficult than expected. Confidential heard a tale about a well-known actor who was rehearsing an audition at home for a high-profile project that has just been announced. Apparently they were doing such a believable job rehearsing the intense scene between a man and a woman that the neighbour came running over to help. The actors had to convince their concerned neighbour there wasn’t actually any abuse going on in the home.
EVENT OF THE WEEK
Film lovers adopted French style and enjoyed pastries, champagne and screening of La Daronne at the launch of the 2021 Alliance Française French Film Festival at Palace Barracks on Wednesday night. The festival runs from March 17 to April 13.
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