A row of abandoned oil tanks is filled with creepers on the riverside of Liyun River in Huai 'an, East China's Jiangsu Province, May 9, 2023. (Photo credit should read CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

A man walks along a corridor at a hotel in Singapore on February 7, 2024. (Photo by Edgar Su/Reuters)

Someone struggles with an umbrella on Mudeford Quay seafront in Dorset, UK during storm Nelson on March 28, 2024. (Photo by Steve Hogan/Picture Exclusive)

Takeoka Chisaka, Hiroshima, Japan. “One morning in August 1945, I was walking home from the night shift at a factory in Hiroshima. As I reached my door, there was a huge explosion. When I came to, my head was bleeding and I had been blasted 30m away. The atomic bomb had detonated. When I found my mother, her eyes were badly burned. A doctor said they had to come out, but he didn’t have the proper tools so used a knife instead. It was hellish. I became a peace-worker after the war. In the 1960s, at a meeting at the UN, I met one of the people who created the atomic bomb. He apologised”. (Photo and caption by Sasha Maslov)

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.

Punk protest band p*ssy Riot member Maria Alyokhina is detained by police at a protest in central Moscow February 24, 2014. Russian riot police detained over a hundred protesters, including two members of p*ssy Riot, on Monday at a Moscow courthouse where seven opponents of President Vladimir Putin were jailed from two and a half to four years over a demonstration that turned violent. (Photo by Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)

A lone protester sings outside the offices of Republican president-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in New York, New York, U.S. November 14, 2016. (Photo by Carlo Allegri/Reuters)

An Indian girl smiles under a water splash at a water park as the temperatures reached 38 degree Celsius in Calcutta, eastern India, 12 June 2016. The summer or pre-monsoon season lasts from March to July in eastern India with the highest day temperatures ranging from 38 to 45 degrees Celsius. (Photo by Piyal Adhikary/EPA)