Lewis was diagnosed with ear infection hours before his play

Damian Lewis says he was diagnosed with an ear infection a few hours before the opening night of his play "The Goat".

The 46-year-old actor has revealed the contamination affected him so much that he feared he was about to faint on stage, reported The Telegraph.

"There was this awful cold that was passed around the company in the last four or five weeks and I held out until about four days ago.

"I had this streaming cold. The catarrh all transferred into my ear. I went to an emergency doctor at about three o'clock and he had a look in there and said, 'You've got a great big hole in your eardrum and you've got an infection of the middle ear," says Lewis.
 

The "Homeland" star jokes that because it was a theatre performance, he did not have to worry about being heavily drugged to relieve the pain.

"(I was "high as a kite on performance-enhancing drugs, which luckily aren't illegal in the theatre. But I've got tremendous pain in my right ear at the moment because of the pressure," he says.