‘Organic’ bond between Amber Heard and AFL player

Former Gold Coast Suns and Hawthorn player Mitch Hallahan is believed to have forged a close friendship with the Hollywood bombshell after a chance encounter in The Garden Bar at The Star Casino on the Gold Coast in 2017.Heard was living on the Gold Coast for much of that year while filming the blockbuster superhero flick Aquaman in which she played Mera alongside Jason Momoa.Hallahan was at a private function at The Star venue in April or May 2017 with teammates, while the cast and crew of the film Aquaman were at a separate function in the same area.The two groups ended up mingling and, so the story goes, Hallahan was among several players introduced to Heard.The pair struck up a close friendship and are rumoured to have briefly dated after Heard’s then relationship with Elon Musk ended around August that year.“It was purely organic and by chance over a glass of red wine,” one source said of the connection the pair made after their accidental introduction.Heard was “intelligent, charismatic and caring,” the source said, adding that several Gold Coast Suns players met her through Hallahan during her time on the Gold Coast and were dazzled by her easy charm and style.Rumours swirled in the media at the time that Heard had a firm friendship with a Gold Coast-based footballer.Hallahan, however, was never named as the player who had caught Heard’s eye and their friendship and then rumoured romance was never confirmed.Heard, cheerfully sporting a Suns scarf, was photographed at a Gold Coast Suns game in July 2017 with castmates including Dolph Lundgren. It was the only AFL game she attended.“She was fascinated by the game but never really understood it,” a source said.Heard, 36, left Australia towards the end of 2017 after the Aquaman shoot was completed and in December of that year, the now single actor, briefly reunited with Musk.Hallahan, 29, played just six senior games for Hawthorn between 2011 and 2014 and 20 games for the Gold Coast Suns between 2015 and 2017 with his career severely hampered by injury.Based in Melbourne, he plays with Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula and was named the Mornington Peninsula Nepean Football League’s best and fairest player in 2019.Hallahan declined to comment when contacted by the Sunday Herald Sun.Heard’s media representative Shane Communications also declined to comment. Heard is currently telling all in a US court about her disastrous marriage to Johnny Depp which imploded on the Gold Coast in 2015 when the couple was in Australia for the filming of a Pirates of the Caribbean movie.Heard’s testimony comes after Depp alleged during the case that the top of one of his fingers was severed by a vodka bottle that his then wife threw at him.Depp brought a $50m (USD) legal action against Heard alleging she had defamed him in a 2018 opinion piece published in the Washington Post. She is counter suing him for $100m (USD).During the trial Heard’s former talent agent Christian Carino claimed that the actress told him at the time of her break up with Musk, whom she dated after splitting with Depp, that she was “just filling space” with the billionaire entrepreneur. In a response to a text from Heard, Carino wrote: “You could avoid all this if you stopped dating über-famous people. You can be with a big man who isn’t famous.”