An aurora is seen in the sky in Pajala, Sweden on February 10, 2022. (Photo by Alexander Kuznetsov/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.

An Iraqi man comforts his 4-year-old son at a regroupment center for POWs of the 101st Airborne Division near An Najaf, Iraq, March 31, 2003. The man was seized in An Najaf with his son and the U.S. military did not want to separate them. (Photo by Jean-Marc Bouju/Associated Press)

Tigray refugees who fled the conflict in the Ethiopia's Tigray ride a bus going to the Village 8 temporary shelter, near the Sudan-Ethiopia border, in Hamdayet, eastern Sudan, Tuesday, December 1, 2020. (Photo by Nariman El-Mofty/AP Photo)

Local men help a wounded woman after a mortar attack by the Ukrainian army of the center of Donetsk, Ukraine, 14 August 2014. Reports state that ten local people where wounded and one killed after the mortar attack. (Photo by Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA)

A view of trees shrouded in fog on a late summer morning between Tureby and Slimminge on Zealand, Denmark, 10 September 2021. (Photo by Mads Claus Rasmussen/EPA/EFE)

A woman falls while slipping on ice during freezing rain on Roosevelt Island, a borough of Manhattan, in New York January 5, 2014. New York City was hit on Friday by the first severe winter storm of 2014 and was still in the grip of sub-freezing weather on Sunday morning. The woman got up and walked away from the fall. (Photo by Zoran Milich/Reuters)

An Indian Hindu man dressed as Lord Shiva holds a lit candle in his mouth as he takes part in a religious procession ahead of the Maha Shivratri Festival in Jalandhar on February 22, 2017. Hindus mark the Maha Shivratri festival by offering special prayers and fasting to worship Lord Shiva, the lord of destruction. (Photo by Shammi Mehra/AFP Photo)