'Nurses have been ringing the alarm bells for years,' says Late Shift star Leonie Benesch

RTÉ News​

01-08-2025

Leonie Benesch gives one of the best performances of 2025 in the hospital drama Late Shift, playing no-nonsense Swiss nurse Floria. The Teacher's Lounge and September 5 star tells RTÉ Entertainment about making the acclaimed film.
Harry Guerin: A lot of scripts and projects come your way. What was it about Late Shift that had you hooked?
Leonie Benesch: First of all, I knew about the project through Judith Kaufmann, the director of photography [on Late Shift ]. She was the director of photography on The Teacher's Lounge, and we've become friends. She mentioned this project to me, and I know that Petra (Volpe, Late Shift writer-director) didn't send it to me for a while because she was scared that it would be too similar to The Teacher's Lounge and I might not be interested.
When she did eventually send it to me, I wanted to do it immediately, because it was such a well-researched script. All the characters, all the patients were very clearly drawn. There was a tonne of research in it. I think you can tell. She knew about all the diagnoses. She knew about all the routines, the blood pressure wagon, and, you know, there was a whole choreography about 'when is that thing where?'.
I love reading a script that is so ready. It sounds very silly, but it doesn't happen very often. That gives me confidence that the director and writer - in this case the same person - she knows where she wants to go. And then it's easy for me to just do my part and let myself fall into her arms and completely trust her.
You spent a week in a hospital with nurses to prepare.
I was really nervous. I did five shifts - two morning shifts and three late shifts. They put me up in a hotel in Basle, but the hospital was a little outside of Basle, so I took the train there. I think I got up at 5:30am or something because I wanted to be on time.
They (the nurses) had been told that someone was going to be there - that happens sometimes when people want to look at the profession to see if that might be something for them. They have people who are basically a fly on the wall with them. You just walk with them. Obviously, you can't do anything, but you just get a sense of what that profession is.
I think by the end of the five days, someone - because we had a moment and they asked me - said, 'You're an actor? What do you mean, like? What's your name?' And then they Googled me. 'So you wear fancy stuff sometimes?!' The nice thing was no one cared or had the time to care that I was there, so I could just observe. It was really essential. It was all about soaking in the choreography.
I was very interested in the way the nurses speak to each other as opposed to how they deal with the patients. Each patient is different - it's such a unique skill to walk into a room and have an immediate understanding of who the patient is and what they might need. Some want numbers, some want to show you pictures of their pets, some want to just be touched, some really don't want to be touched. Nurses walk into rooms and get to deal with these different kinds of worlds. That's amazing. It's really fascinating.
I've spent a lot of time in hospitals with family. You make a very convincing nurse.
I don't think there's many films or depictions of that profession where we get a clear picture of just the complexity of it and the amount of things you need to know on the medical scale, but also emotional and athletic skills. These people are athletes. We always talked about this character as an athlete.
One of the striking things in Late Shift is how few of the patients and their families say thank you to your character, Floria.
That did also strike me when I did the internship. There's quite a few people who treat their stay at the hospital like a stay at a hotel. It's not just the private patients. I think there's quite a lot of entitlement towards nurses because nurses are being looked down on because traditionally they've not been... the profession's not been getting the kind of attention it actually deserves. The idea is to paint an average-y shift, so we get an idea of what it is like to work a shift and not take the most horrific one.
In Ireland, we think of our health service as being in permacrisis, so it is an eye-opener to see the statistics in Late Shift that Switzerland will be short of 30,000 nurses by 2030 - and 36% of trained nurses quit within four years.
It's the same everywhere. I mean, us rich countries, we're still a bit better off. Petra (Volpe, Late Shift writer-director) talked about this recently because there's always a question of sexism. 80% of the people in this profession are women, and that usually means they're overlooked, underpaid, and underappreciated.
Petra was telling this story of how there was a threat of a pilot shortage in Switzerland a few years ago. The government immediately stepped in, something like 60,000 francs extra per year. They made it really attractive to become a pilot, the crisis was averted. It's mainly men in that profession. And it is possible, it's a rich country - they could throw money at this (nursing).
Nurses have been ringing the alarm bells for over 10 years, and it's only getting worse because hospitals are run like businesses in Switzerland and Germany. And they're run by people who studied in Oxbridge and Harvard, and they studied business. None of them has ever been by a bedside. And they're not interested in putting people in charge who know about nursing because they will always advocate for more staff.
It's so mind-boggling because we know if you have better care, people are in hospital [for a] shorter [time], and it will actually benefit the hospital financially to invest more into workers. I don't really understand why it's not happening.
Many people say after a stay in hospital that they will completely change their outlook on life and cultivate a sense of gratitude. Having played a nurse in Late Shift, has it changed how you deal with stress in your own profession?
What I do is very easy. The amount of money I get paid for a couple of months' work and the amount a nurse gets paid for years and years and years of work and crazy shifts and not being able to have a weekend, doing night shifts - there is no correlation. It's very strange what we as a society deem worthy of paying a lot of money for and what jobs we don't pay a lot of money to. It's very arbitrary.
Judging by the coverage, Late Shift has deeply resonated with anyone who has seen it.
It's amazing. Judith (Kaufmann, cinematographer), Petra (Volpe, writer-director), and I have never had this amount of feedback for anything we've done. It's been really, really moving. We've been sent emails to our agents that they're forwarding to us from people in that profession (nursing). We always said that if people in the healthcare sector, if nurses feel seen, if nurses watch this film and go, 'That's what it's like, and thanks for seeing me', then we've done something right. That does seem to be the case, and it's very moving.