Daisy Ridley suffered from a chronic ear infection while shooting her new movie Young Woman and the Sea.

In the upcoming biographical drama, the Star Wars actress plays Gertrude ‘Trudy’ Ederle, the first woman to swim across the English Channel in 1926.

Ridley revealed in an interview with Empire magazine that spending so much time in the water wreaked havoc on her ears.

“I have mad ear issues now from just the intensity of the swimming. I basically had a chronic ear infection the whole time, and now I have a thing with my eardrum, so my hearing went a bit funny,” she shared.

But that wasn’t all – the 32-year-old star also ripped a muscle in her arm while shooting a scene with Christopher Eccleston, who plays Trudy’s ill-intentioned coach Jabez Wolffe.

“The injury I actually sustained was the moment in the film where I’m dragged out of the water. Because I had to slump over Christopher Eccleston, I ripped some muscle in (my arm),” she said.

At the beginning of the story, Trudy only knows how to doggy paddle, and Ridley admitted that swimming style was the hardest to film.

“Doing the doggy paddle was the worst part of all of the swimming,” she recalled. “I could honestly barely breathe. It is such an intense waste of energy. So ridiculous compared to the crawl. That was really the hardest day filming.”

Reflecting on her own swimming progress, she added, “By the end of it, I couldn’t believe how much better I’d gotten at swimming, because when I first started training, I literally couldn’t do a length. We went to a 20-metre pool, and I got to halfway and stood up and was like… (Heavy panting).”

Young Woman and the Sea will be released in cinemas on 31 May.

© Cover Media