Ruchaya Nillakan (L) and Nuttimon Sanyamast (C), same-sеx couple, attend their marriage registration event at Paragon shopping mall in Bangkok on January 23, 2025. A high-profile gay couple married in Thailand on January 23 as the kingdom's same-sеx marriage law went into effect, an AFP journalist saw, among the first of hundreds expected to do so. (Photo by Chanakarn Laosarakham/AFP Photo)

Dancers take part in the World Salsa Festival at El Pueblo Coliseum in Cali, Colombia, 26 September 2025. (Photo by Ernesto Guzman Jr./EPA)

Street entertainer and fortune teller “Juana La Cubana” smiles holding a cigar in her mouth as she waits for tourists in Havana, Cuba, Sunday, May 24, 2015. Juana is 72 years old and has worked in the Cathedral square in Old Havana for 28 years. (Photo by Desmond Boylan/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.

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)

Revellers chat on Havana's Malecon seafront before performing at a carnival parade, Cuba, August 12, 2016. (Photo by Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters)

Mark Dill and Brit Thacker practice acro-yoga as approximately 70,000 people from all over the world gather for the 30th annual Burning Man arts and music festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, U.S. August 29, 2016. (Photo by Jim Urquhart/Reuters)

A tearful Beatle lover pleads unsuccessfully with a policeman to carry her fan button to Ringo, one of the four mop-top singers who drew squeals and shrieks from more than 30,000 spectators at two Indiana State Fair shows in Indianapolis on September 4, 1964. (Photo by Bob Daugherty/AP Photo)