Katherine LaNasa is "grossed out" by the gory medical scenes in The Pitt.

The 59-year-old actress - who plays lead nurse Dana Evans in the real-time hospital drama - admitted she can "barely look" at the actors sporting injuries during filming, even though she knows they have been created by the make-up department and despite years of familiarity in real medical settings because of her surgeon father.

She admitted to The Times newspaper: "I'm grossed out by all of it. Even now on set they do such an incredible job with the prosthetics, I can barely look."

Katherine initially trained as a dancer and her background has proven to be very useful for even simple scenes in The Pitt that involve walking through hospital corridors.

She explained: "You might be walking towards someone from 30 feet away. You can't hear their line yet, but you have to arrive exactly at the right moment. So you speed up or slow down and it has to look completely natural... It's like dancing again."

The Big Love actress feared she'd never work again when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and she was then diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023.

She said: "Once we stopped auditioning in person, it got really hard. I wasn't sure if I was going to work again...

"I got cancer. So it wasn't really a great period.

"You start to feel like you're never going to escape it. You go from feeling healthy to suddenly being in the hospital all the time."

Six months after her final overnight hospital trip, Katherine began filming The Pitt and soon realised how her own experiences influenced her performance.

She said: "It gave me a real window into how scared people are when they come into the emergency department."

And while she almost gave up on acting, Katherine still felt success was achievable.

She said: "Well into my forties and fifties I'd joke that I was still waiting to be discovered. I really believed in myself."

And Katherine - who won the Best Supporting Actress Emmy last September - thinks finding career success later in life has its advantages.

She said: "Now I'm very aware there's this shiny spotlight on me.

"I want to hold it with grace. Take it in, feel it, but also know it will move on to the next actress. And I want to be happy about that when it does."