The German actress Leonie Benesch appears in every scene of Petra Volpe’s “Late Shift,” a tense drama about a night nurse in an understaffed hospital.
The film, which screens at the inaugural edition of South by Southwest London on Tuesday in its British debut, follows Benesch’s character, Floria, over the course of a single night. She rushes from bedside to bedside, bringing patients painkillers or peppermint tea and calms their nerves by trying to get hold of a doctor — or just by singing to them.
To prepare for the role, Benesch said she shadowed nurses in a hospital for a week, learning to handle medical equipment and internalizing the rhythm of care work.
“I wanted to understand the choreography and how do they move. How do they interact with patients? What’s the code-switching between talking to one another and talking to patients?” Benesch, 34, said in an interview. “The challenge for me,” she added, “was that a health care professional watch this and go: She could be one of us.”
The actress spoke in May from a hotel bar in Cardiff, Wales, in crisp British-accented English. She was in Wales filming the political thriller “Prisoner,” the sort of large-budget international television production that dots her résumé along with smaller art house films.
Benesch was born in Hamburg and raised in various parts of Germany. Starting at age 9, she was in a children’s circus (“tightrope walking, lots of juggling and acrobatics”) and, later, performed in her eighth-grade school play. “I realized it’s really easy for me to learn lines, it’s easy for me to find truth in texts and spoken word, and I find it easy to be in front of a crowd,” she said.
When she was 17, she landed her first major film role in Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or-winning and Oscar-nominated film “The White Ribbon.” Haneke found her a coach to introduce Method acting. Benesch considers the experience formative, even if she realized that the Method was not for her. “No one can ever take away from me having observed someone who’s so meticulous about every single detail,” she said. “There’s something definitely in the work ethic that I learned on that set and never really let go of,” she added.
After the film’s success, Benesch decided to defer her career in order to train professionally. After seeing “The White Ribbon,” the stage director Thomas Ostermeier advised her to study at the Ernst Busch University of Theater Arts in Berlin and said he would employ her at his theater, the Schaubühne, once she graduated, Benesch recalled. She applied, but did not get in, to the prestigious conservatory. She worked at bars and cafes in Berlin for the next year and change before applying and being accepted at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London. The program, she said, gave her an appreciation of acting as craft.
“The audience have to feel something, and how do you achieve that? That has to do with rhythm. It has to do with the way you hold yourself. It has to do with understanding a script and tension and release and all these sorts of things,” she said.
After graduating from Guildhall in 2016, she landed a small role on Netflix’s “The Crown” (as Princess Cecilie) and a more sustained one on the blockbuster German TV series “Babylon Berlin,” where she played a young maid radicalized by political upheavals. Roles like these introduced Benesch as an alert and wide-eyed performer of quiet emotional intensity.
A major breakthrough came in 2023 when she landed the lead in the German Turkish director Ilker Catak’s “The Teacher’s Lounge.” After a series of big TV productions, Benesch was happy to work on a more intimate scale. “I was like, this is a film that probably no one will end up seeing, but for me, it’s very good. It’s an opportunity to go back to the roots and reinvestigate what it is that I like about acting,” she said.
The film struggled to find a distributor, but it debuted to strong reviews at the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival and ended up getting an Oscar nomination for best international feature. It also won five German film awards, known as the Lolas, including best actress for Benesch for her performance as an idealistic schoolteacher caught in an ethical quandary. (Last month Benesch won a second Lola for her supporting role as a German interpreter in “September 5,” Tim Fehlbaum’s film about the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics)
Volpe, the director of “Late Shift,” said she had admired Benesch in “Babylon Berlin” and “The Teacher’s Lounge,” but hesitated to ask her to audition for the role of Floria, another professional woman under intense institutional pressure.
“l thought that maybe the role, because it’s one woman in one place, would be too similar for her,” Volpe recalled in a phone interview. “Maybe she would not feel challenged by it. That was my fear.”
But Volpe sent Benesch the script, and the actress responded with enthusiasm and agreed to a video audition.
“It was very apparent that Petra had done a lot of research, and that jumped off the page,” Benesch recalled. “I like when a script is rich with research because I understand the world in which everything happens.”
Watching Benesch audition, Volpe said she knew immediately that she had found her Floria. “She was so credible and so authentic and so natural,” the director said.
“It’s an action movie basically. It’s a ‘nurse action movie,’ and the character is extremely un-psychological,” Volpe added. “I think that Leonie’s presence and warmth and just the way she’s there for everybody turned out to be fascinating enough and emotional enough for an audience to relate to,” she said.
On set, Volpe was impressed with Benesch’s degree of commitment and preparation. “She was one of the most pragmatic actors I’ve ever met. She’s zero Method, like zero,” she said.
“She came to the set so exhausted. And from the beginning, we said, ‘let’s work with this exhaustion. Let’s not fight it, because that’s the situation of nurses,’” Volpe continued, adding that she sometimes found Benesch sitting quietly in the corner of the buzzing set getting ready for a take. “And when the camera is on, something magical happens,” she explained. “She’s really mysteriously spot-on, and it’s fascinating.”
Benesch did not say much about her role in “Prisoner,” the political thriller being shot in Cardiff, but called it a refreshing change of pace. “I definitely like it because it’s an 80 percent physical part, and it has to do with the way that my character holds herself, and there’s a coldness to her that I haven’t explored in a while,” she said.
She mentioned having recently seen and been impressed by Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners.” She said she would love to do something on such a bold scale.
“I don’t know what shape that would take for me,” she continued, “but I know that there’s something here that makes me go, ‘can’t do that,’ and that’s an interesting place to go to.”
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