Breaking Baz: ‘The Teachers’ Lounge’ Star Leonie Benesch Scrubs In For Medical Feature ‘Late Shift’

German Actress Leonie Benan (September 5, The Teachers’ Lounge) feels that we’ve been inundated with medical dramas on television that offer unrealistic depictions of what actually occurs in a hospital.

The glamorized flights of fantasy of such shows are a far cry from what Berlin-based Benesch experienced making director Petra Volpe’s feature Late Shift, where she plays Floria, a hard-working staff nurse who works the highly pressurized night duty at a major Swiss hospital.

“Usually, film and television doctors get all the screen time and all the stories and all the credit, whereas in reality, it is nurses that are at the patient’s bed and do the work and actually also do, medically, much more complicated things than we would assume when watching normal emergency room dramas,” she observes.

Late Shift is released by Vertigo in the UK and Ireland this weekend, at a time of great unrest in the health industry. UK resident doctors recently ended a five-day strike over pay and pensions. Nurses, who are notoriously overworked and underpaid, are considering following suit.

Nursing also is woefully understaffed, certainly in the UK and on the European continent. The National Health Service is itself in poor health, but somehow it rattles along thanks to its dedicated nurses — just like Benesch’s Floria, who hits the ground running the moment she slips on her trainers.

The shoes transform Floria’s physicality: She straightens her shoulders and seems to be in constant motion as she makes her rounds, checking in on a disparate group of patients.

During a short internship that Benesch undertook, working day and night shifts at an hospital in Basel, the thespian says that Volpe suggested she pay attention to how the nurses moved when they made their way along corridors.

What she saw there bore zero relation to the never-ending stream of medical shows that are spread like a virus across our television landscape. Medical dramas have infected our sets for decades. Emergency-Ward 10, Dr. Kildare, M*A*S*H, and the Diahann Carroll series Julia popular hits back in the day when I was a kid.

Now, there’s The Pitt, House, Chicago Med to name but three out of 1,001. I have made a point of watching the early seasons of Grey’s Anatomy, and it was all too easy to get sucked into the lives of Ellen Pompeo’s Meredith Grey, Sandra Oh’s Cristina Yang, Katherine Heigl’s Izzie Stevens, Patrick Dempsey’s Derek Shepherd, T.R. Knight’s George O’Malley, Justin Chambers’ Alex Karev and marvelous Chandra Wilson’s Miranda Bailey. I thoroughly scrubbed my hands after viewing.

Grey’s Anatomy’s storylines often are quite ridiculous, but, in my view, those very early seasons are far superior to the over-the-top tales told in more recent seasons. ABC launches the 22nd season this fall.

Late Shifthowever, is underpinned by Volpe’s rigorous research. As Benesch says, the director doesn’t “overdramatize what is already dramatic.”

When they met, Benesch says that Volpe was keen to make clear her film’s distinction to director Ilker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Loungein which Benesch’s performance as a naive educator won her much acclaim. Çatak’s film is an artwork that explores “intellectual problems and intellectual discussions” where people “twist things against you,” whereas Floria in Late Shift just goes to to her job and “doesn’t have an agenda.”

And Floria most certainly doesn’t indulge in any of the hanky-panky in elevators and storerooms of the kind that the randy staffers in Grey’s Anatomy wallow in.

“Petra asked me to observe how the nurses interact,” Benesch recalls, “and how they handle equipment and how they usually always have two things in their hands.”

Volpe also pointed Benesch to practical tips such as to have “no fear of bodily fluids” and how nurses do not hesitate when it comes to being practical and getting their hands dirty. “And that taps into something that I think I was raised with,” she says. “I have three younger brothers. We moved around a lot when I was a kid. My mum is someone who’s very hands-on, and she doesn’t shy away from touching things and doing things. I was like, ‘I know what Petra means.’”

The idea of being on your feet all day and night was choreographed down to the last second, especially so for a scene involving a nervous patient. Judith Kaufmann’s cameras captures the man getting undressed, then being placed onto a gurney to be ferried to an elevator. “That was the longest shot in the film. I think it’s four minutes, and we rehearsed it over and over,” she says. “It’s like a dance and there’s no cut — OK maybe there’s a tiny cut — until I’m in the elevator with the patient.”

I’m a fan of movies where people work in public services. Benesch nods in agreement.

“The focus of this film is in showing the actual work of the nurse,” she says. “We are seeing how long it takes to mix the meds. The moment for a patient when the nurse leaves to bring them the painkiller. … If you need to sign out the morphine, there is a procedure you have to stick to or else you get fired. Or the IV fluid — it does take as long as it takes until it is ready. And I think it’s very beautiful that the focus is on that.”

It works, Benesch insists, “because it’s real.”

She donned a uniform for her real shifts and mingled with real nurses, shadowing them when they checked in on patients and accompanying them on doctors’ rounds.

One especially calm night allowed time for Benesch to quiz the health workers while surgeons were otherwise occupied operating in theaters. That’s when Volpe figured it would be the best to set the film at nighttime, hence its title.

Benesch was able to observe the application of minor procedures, the dispensing of medicines, catching up with admin. She assures that, being unqualified, she was “not allowed to touch anyone. I made some cups of tea, but I didn’t participate in any service.”

The Swiss, she advises, have a brilliant word, snatch “which means having a sniff. … So the nursing staff check with the patients if it’s OK for me to be in the room. Everyone, I think, assumed that maybe I’m a student. Although, there was one patient who I think knew I was an actor. I was very attentive as to what the nurses were doing. I was having a having a good sniff around, a snatching. “

Simple tasks were instructive: She observed the nurses at their computers “because the rules are so strict about having to put everything in there,” and she liked how quick they were in documenting everything while still having patients in their eye line.

Watching the specific IV procedures involving needles and syringes proved beneficial. She noticed a nurse hook up the IV and then fiddle about with unwrapping a syringe, doing so in one fluid movement on her knee. Both director Volpe and DP Kaufmann wanted her to repeat it in the movie.

“They wanted that feeling of action and fluidity of the movement without any stop. … And they wanted the moment to look as if it’s become second nature like cutting an onion,” says Benesch.

I wondered if she’d felt squeamish in any way during the shoot?

“Well, you can’t be,” she responds firmly. “I think that would be a sign of a terrible nurse. Even if you are, you can’t show it. “

During one of her real-life shifts in the hospital, she asked a lot of questions about how they dealt with eruptions of bodily fluids. “Some of the stories they told me about such matters were absolutely horrifying,” but the nurses explained that they were only horrified in the moment. “You have to keep your face straight because it’s about the dignity of the person it happens to.”

She remembers travlling from L.A. at the height of awards season to Switzerland for rehearsals on Late Shift. “From the glamour of Hollywood” to shooting a scene where she changes a patient’s incontinence pants, she laughs. Whilst shooting the scene, the Oscar nominations were announced. “We went from the set to the green room to where the crew, many of whom had worked on The Teachers’ Loungehad the Oscar nominations livestreamed on laptops.”

The Teachers’ Lounge was nominated for Best International Feature. “It was all very surreal. We gave ourselves five minutes of celebration, and then we continued with the chocolate sauce for the incontinence scene, which puts it all into perspective,” she says smiling.

Bensesh was in London for meetings and for post-production on Prisonera six-part action crime thriller for Sky. She has another project that’s in post called The hero from Friedrichstrasse train station, directed by Wolfgang Becker (Good Bye, Lenin!). It was to be the filmmaker’s final picture; he passed away two weeks after the production wrapped.

“We all knew it was probably his last film, but we didn’t expect him to wrap and then go,” Benesch says.

She also stars in Belgian television series Moresnet, involves a tech company and time-travel, directed by Frank Van Passel (Manneken Pis). The show’s already screened in Belgium, but she recently completed the German dubbing for it.

She studied at the Guildhall Scool of Music and Drama in London for three years and stayed for a further five years before moving back to Berlin in early 2021.

Growing up, Benesch’s parents banished television sets from their home. Evenings were spent gathered around a roaring fire, where her family chatted and read — heaven for a child in love with literature.

“My parents were, let’s call it alternative, and they were convinced that it wasn’t good for kids to be obsessed with screens. I would argue that if you keep it from them, they’ll become obsessed later on,” she suggests.

Benesch remembers being in Cannes in 2009 for her role in Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner The White Ribbon. As a somewhat sheltered teen, the experience was terrifying.

Her management at a kids agency had been clueless about what being at the festival would entail.

“I did feel just like a red naked potato for three days straight,” she says. “I’d never seen myself on screen before. I’d never worn high heels before. I didn’t know anything about hair and makeup. We didn’t know that we needed to organize the dresses, I knew nothing. I didn’t know what a photo call was. I didn’t know what a press conference was. So it was a lot of firsts. And I just had new braces, and I had no idea what was happening. I was just utterly terrified.

“I was a baby! It was overwhelming. I was thrown in at the deep end,” she says, shivering at the memory.

“Even though I joke about it now, I would love to go back. Obviously it’s Cannes! I am waiting to make amends with that quite horrible first experience.”

After The White RibbonBenesch felt that “maybe this is not what I want.”

But a few months later she traveled with creatives and crew to Hollywood for the Academy Awards, where Haneke’s film was nominated for two Oscars including Best Foreign Language Film. For two weeks, Benesch says, she met a lot of “stressed out people” and departed feeling “I don’t want to be like you.” So she “withdrew myself a little bit, and I went back to school in Germany and finished my A-Levels.”

Shortly afterward, Benesch moved from the family home in Southern Germany to live in Berlin, where she changed agents and began working with acting teacher Mike Bernardin, who spoke to her of drama schools and theatrical reps in London.

Not long afterward she met Christian Hodell at an awards event in London when she represented The White Ribbon. Hamilton Hodell, where she’s overseen by Elizabeth Fieldhouse, has repped her ever since.