The Traitors’ star ‘screaming in hospital’ after life-threatening injury

The Traitors star Paul Gorton has spoken about a life-threatening injury that almost cost him his place on the BBC show, which left him in hospital just weeks before filming began.

The TV villain was the third person banished from the BBC competition on Thursday but it almost wasn’t too be when he was left ‘screaming and crying’ in hospital, with the 36-year-old Manchester-based business manager suffering a collapsed lung during a game of football, only four weeks before filming started in Scotland.

Paul detailed what happened after he was tackled during the football match, leaving him worrying for his life after the collision. He said: “My lung collapsed. I was outside A&E, screaming and crying, and I was on morphine and CAT scans and all that type of stuff. I nearly had an emergency operation to re-inflate my lung because it had depressed so much, and yeah, it was chaos.”

The Traitors star added to OK! magazine, “They also couldn’t give me the painkillers that I needed to be on because it affected my body in a different way. So I went through all this type of stuff, and then in the back of my brain, I was going, ‘Oh my God, in four weeks I’m actually going on The Traitors.'”

The recovery period following his hospitalisation saw Paul’s partner Kate having to do most of the work with looking after Charlie, their one-year-old son, as Paul was incapacitated. He said about that time: “I’m a really hands on dad and Kate had to do an awful lot of stuff because I couldn’t pick Charlie up for a good chunk of time. But I tried to do as much as I could, but being injured at home and not being hands on and stuff like that was so tough. And I was just starting a new job. There was all sorts of stuff going on, but I would have regretted it if I had pulled out [of The Traitors].”

The first challenge that Paul faced on the TV show was having to swim across a lake and put together puzzle pieces on the water and Paul was fearing that his lung would collapse again. Speaking about the challenge, Paul said: “It was the most strenuous exercise I had done since the injury, and I was thinking, ‘Oh, my God, am I gonna be able to do this? Is it gonna collapse again?’ because it can just collapse again on its own. I didn’t want to tell anyone on the show because it felt a bit like sympathy story, sob story.”

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