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.

A competitor poses before the Tough Guy Challenge endurance race on January 27, 2013 in Telford, England. Every year thousands of people run the 8 mile assault course which involves freezing temperatures, fire and ice. (Photo by Michael Regan)

A visitor to The Brooklands Double Twelve Motorsport Festival admires a 1914 Morgan Three Wheeler in front of a Hawker P1127 prototype jet aircraft on June 18, 2011 in Weybridge, England. Two hundred vintage cars are competing in various races, tests and speed trials over the two day event held at the Brooklands Museum. Brooklands was the world's first purpose-built, permanent motorsport venue that opened in 1907. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

People help a woman overwhelmed by emotion and the heat during the mass funeral, attended by tens of thousands of mourners, of 613 coffins of newly-identified victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre at the Potocari cemetery and memorial near Srebrenica on July 11, 2011 in Potocari, Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

(L-R) Zandea,18, and Jessica, 21, pose showing off their clothing backstage during a show featuring OPT jeans December 8, 2011 in Yangon, Myanmar. (Photo by Paula Bronstein /Getty Images)

Tourists watch the sunrise and pray outside a church on the summit of Mount Moses, near the city of Saint Catherine, in the Sinai Peninsula, south of Egypt, December 9, 2015. (Photo by Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters)

Tiny pieces of space rocks, called meteorites, are seen burning in the atmosphere over the night sky near Salgótarján, some 109km northeast of Budapest, Hungary, 21 April 2018 (issued 22 April 2018). (Photo by Peter Komka/EPA/EFE)

A woman dries chili peppers in the sun at a village in Wuyuan County, Jiangxi province, China July 21, 2017. (Photo by Reuters/China Stringer Network)