The Macy's inflation team works on giant balloons as they prepare ahead of the 96th Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City, United States on November 23, 2022. (Photo by Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

People pose for photos in front of an old Korail train on the disused Gyeonghwa Station railway track during the Jinhae Cherry Blossom Festival in Changwon on March 31, 2024, around 311 kilometres southeast of Seoul. The annual festival has been running since 1952. (Photo by Anthony Wallace/AFP Photo)

A woman reads a newspaper with a front-page report on the crash of the Iranian president's helicopter outside a kiosk in Tehran on May 20, 2024. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was declared dead on May 20 after rescue teams found his crashed helicopter in a fog-shrouded western mountain region, sparking mourning in the Islamic republic. (Photo by Atta Kenare/AFP Photo)

A woman representing the Nuestros Pilares feminist group, plays a violin during a demonstration against gender-based violence marking International Women's Day, in Santiago, Chile, Wednesday, March 8, 2023. (Photo by Esteban Felix/AP Photo)

Street entertainer and fortune teller “Juana La Cubana” smiles holding a cigar in her mouth as she waits for tourists in Havana, Cuba, Sunday, May 24, 2015. Juana is 72 years old and has worked in the Cathedral square in Old Havana for 28 years. (Photo by Desmond Boylan/AP Photo)

Photographer Howard Schatz had an idea: place actors in a series of roles and dramatic situations to reveal the essence of their characters. Such was the premise behind his book, In Character: Actors Acting, which captures some of Hollywood’s most emotive stars in the act of, well, making faces. Luckily for us, he continued the tradition for Vanity Fair. Here are some of the best.

In this May 4, 2014 photo, a miner holds an amalgam of mercury and gold he mined after working a 28-hour shift at an illegal gold mining process, in La Pampa, in Peru's Madre de Dios region. Thousands of artisanal gold miners sweat through the long shifts and endure, for a few grams of gold, the perils of collapsing earth, limb-crushing machinery and the toxic mercury used to bind gold flecks. (Photo by Rodrigo Abd/AP Photo)

A tearful Beatle lover pleads unsuccessfully with a policeman to carry her fan button to Ringo, one of the four mop-top singers who drew squeals and shrieks from more than 30,000 spectators at two Indiana State Fair shows in Indianapolis on September 4, 1964. (Photo by Bob Daugherty/AP Photo)