A portrait of French WWI soldier Edouard Marius Ivaldi is displayed on a tablet, in this illustration picture, alongside his battlefield grave memorial, a wooden cross with a battlefield helmet in Champagne, eastern France, November 3, 2015. (Photo by Charles Platiau/Reuters)

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.

Jan Kara (R) and Jan Holan pedal their boat, made with plastic bottles, on the Elbe river near Kostelec nad Labem July 15, 2014. Jan Kara, a 22-year-old student, and Jakub Bures, a 22-year-old car mechanic, built the 10-metre (32.8-feet) long boat from 5000 plastic bottles strapped to a wooden frame. (Photo by David W. Cerny/Reuters)

In this Wednesday, September 17, 2014 photo, the sun shines over a field of sunflowers in Walkill, N.Y. (Photo by John DeSanto/AP Photo/Times Herlad-Record)

People are caught in a dust storm in New Delhi, India May 23, 2016. (Photo by Anindito Mukherjee/Reuters)

The Enemy, 1944. With the outbreak of world war two, photojournalism was enlisted in defence of Mother Russia. In this photo by Anatoli Egorov, who was wounded in action, corporal Stepan Vasiljevich Ovcharenko shoots at enemy troops with a machine gun. (Photo by Anatoli Egorov/Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography)

A museum employee views “Details of Renaissance Paintings (Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 1482)” by Andy Warhol at the Victoria and Albert museum in London, Britain, March 2, 2016. The piece forms part of “Botticelli Reimagined”, an exhibition exploring the ways artists have responded to the artistic legacy of the fifteenth century artist Sandro Botticelli, and including over fifty artworks by Botticelli himself. (Photo by Toby Melville/Reuters)

A student protester throws a stone against a riot police vehicle during a demonstration to demand changes in the education system in Santiago, Chile, April 21, 2016. (Photo by Ivan Alvarado/Reuters)