People take part in a rally in Jakarta, Indonesia, on March 8, 2024. (Photo by Ajeng Dinar Ulfiana/Reuters)

Citizens are enjoying the festival by shooting hot spring water guns at the Yuseong Hot Spring Festival held on Oncheon-ro in Yuseong-gu, Daejeon in the first decade of May 2025. (Photo by Shin Hyeon-jong)

A Femen activist, Sarah Constantin, is hanged from a noose-like rope from a Paris bridge to call attention to the large number of executions in Iran as she stages a protest against visiting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in Paris, Thursday, January 28, 2016. A near-naked woman hanging from a noose-like rope from a Paris bridge has sent a message to visiting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. (Photo by Zacharie Scheurer/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 woman crowd-surfs in front of the main stage at the Woodstock Festival in Kostrzyn-upon-Odra, close to the Polish-German border, August 2, 2014. Some 500 thousand people attended the festival that is the brainchild of Polish journalist and social campaigner Jerzy Owsiak. He initiated the event to say thank you to those who donated money to his GOCC charity organisation that delivers medical care for children. (Photo by Thomas Peter/Reuters)

A man runs after he tried to put himself on fire during a protest at a makeshift camp at the Greek-Macedonian border near the village of Idomeni on March 22, 2016. Greece will not be able to start sending refugees back to Turkey from March 20, 2016, the government said, as the country struggles to implement a key deal aimed at easing Europe's migrant crisis. The numbers are daunting: officials said as of Saturday there were 47,500 migrants in Greece, including 8,200 on the islands and 10,500 massed at the Idomeni camp on the Macedonian border. (Photo by Andrej Isakovic/AFP Photo)

Haitian soldiers shoot in the air to try to control the crowd as they wait for food to be handed out after Hurricane Matthew hit Jeremie, Haiti, October 18, 2016. (Photo by Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

Yang Shiguang, 77, performs stunts at a park in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, September 3, 2013. Yang has been a member of a stunt performance club since 2007, after retiring from a research institution. (Photo by Reuters/China Daily)