A girl has her face painted during the 236th annual Military, Civic, and Firemen’s Parade as part of 4th of July celebrations in Bristol, Rhode Island, U.S., July 5, 2021. (Photo by Quinn Glabicki/Reuters)

American model Bella Hadid poses as she arrives for the screening of the film “Tre Piani” (Three Floors) at the 74th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, on July 11, 2021. (Photo by Reinhard Krause/Reuters)

A group police are seen outside the home of a senior police officer in Bangkok, Thailand, Wednesday, March 15, 2023. Thai police have arrested a fellow officer who fired multiple gunshots from his home in Bangkok which forced an over 24 hours-long standoff after his colleagues tried to take him to be treated for mental illness. (Photo by Sakchai Lalit/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.

A pro-democracy demonstrator fights with a Soviet soldier on top of a tank parked in front of the Russian Federation building on August 19, 1991, after a coup toppled Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. The same day, thousands in Moscow, Leningrad, and other cities answered Russian Republic President Boris Yeltsin's call to raise barricades against tanks and troops. (Dima Tanin/AFP/Getty Images)

This handout picture taken and released by the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOSF) on October 26, 2015 shows baby orangutans, which had previously suffered from respiratory problems, playing at a nursery in the rehabilitation centre operated by the BOSF on the outskirts of Palangkaraya in Central Kalimantan. Endangered orangutans are falling victim to a devastating haze crisis that has left them sick, malnourished and severely traumatised as fires rage through Indonesia's forests, reducing their habitat to a charred wasteland. (Photo by AFP Photo/Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation/Indrayana)

Participants of the 77th edition of the annual Christmas swimming 'Coupe de Noel' jump into the waters of Lake Geneva, in Geneva, Switzerland, 20 December 2015. More than 1,540 men and women braved the water temperature of just 8 degrees Celsius as they swam a 120 meters distance at the traditional Christmas swimming in Geneva. (Photo by Salvatore Di Nolfi/EPA)

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)