A military aircraft flies low through the Mach Loop in west-central Wales on September 25, 2025 during Cobra Warrior 25-2, one of Nato’s largest multinational air exercises. The operation, running across the UK until October 3, brings together air forces from the UK, US, Canada, Italy and Germany for three weeks of high-intensity training in challenging low-level environments. (Photo by Tony Marsh)

Actors Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner are seen getting into character while on set filming scenes for their new movie “One Night Only” tonight in New York City on November 12, 2025. (Photo by Jose Perez/Backgrid USA)

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.

Leicester City hostesses take pictures in front of a billboard as people gather to watch the team's English Premier League soccer match against Everton on a big screen, in Bangkok, Thailand, May 7, 2016. (Photo by Jorge Silva/Reuters)

A member of the “Exit Point” amateur rope-jumping group jumps from a 44-metre high (144-feet high) waterpipe bridge in the Siberian Taiga area outside Krasnoyarsk, September 28, 2014. Fans of rope-jumping, a kind of extreme sport involving a jump from a high point using an advanced system of amortization including mountaineering and rope safety equipment, attended the Golden Autumn group's jumping season. (Photo by Ilya Naymushin/Reuters)

Alee Harrison, 13, wears the tv series “Doctor Who” on her legs as she works on a painting for Operation Blue Pride. (Photo by Greg Lovett/The Palm Beach Post)

His own space suit, with oxygen tank, doesn't make Barney the monkey any happier as he and actor Adam West view the situation in their space capsule in Hollywood on January 24, 1964. Barney, a South American woolly monkey, is blasted into space with West, as an astronaut, in a new movie, “Robinson Crusoe on Mars”. (Photo by AP Photo)

A man is silhouetted as he stands on a walkway in the sky lobby at the Chancellery, the seat of German Chancellor Angela Merkel (not pictured) in Berlin, May 7, 2014. (Photo by Thomas Peter/Reuters)