A juvenile European starling hops from deer to deer eating insects. The white-tailed deer did not seem at all bothered by the bird - who can be seen cleaning it of ticks and bugs. The starling was one of a flock near the herd of deer in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, USA in the last decade of November 2025. (Photo by Erik Kessler/Solent News & Photo Agency)

Farmers feed crabs under Metasequoia at the Sihong County Ecological Breeding Base in Suqian City, Jiangsu Province, China, on November 19, 2025. (Photo by Costfoto/NurPhoto/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

In this Tuesday, July 29, 2014, photo, Syrian refugee Samah, 5, poses for a picture at Zaatari refugee camp, near the Syrian border, in Mafraq, Jordan. More than 2.8 million Syrian children inside and outside the country – nearly half the school-aged population – cannot get an education because of the devastation from the civil war, according to the U.N. children's agency, UNICEF. That number is likely higher, as UNICEF can't count the children whose parents didn't register with the United Nations refugee agency. (Photo by Muhammed Muheisen/AP Photo)

Widows, who have been abandoned by their families, light sparklers after offering prayers on the banks of the river Yamuna as part of Diwali celebrations organised by non-governmental organisation Sulabh International in Vrindavan, Uttar Pradesh October 21, 2014. (Photo by Ahmad Masood/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.

Members of an Orthodox community take part in an Easter service at a church in the village of Poteryaevka, some 200 km (124 miles) southwest of the city of Barnaul in Russia's Altai region, on April 24, 2011. (Reuters/Andrei Kasprishin)

Men hang at the back of a truck loaded with farm produce along a road in Ikeja district in the commercial capital Lagos, Nigeria December 19, 2016. (Photo by Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters)

College students take shelter at a traffic point as a man paddles his rickshaw through a flooded road during heavy rain in Guwahati, India, June 13, 2017. (Photo by Anuwar Hazarika/Reuters)