Fishermen catch fish at Mao'er lake at the start of winter fishing season which is a local custom to welcome the new year on December 29, 2018 in Huaian, Jiangsu Province of China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

A palomino horse's mane is seen against the sky at Spancil Hill horse fair in Spancil Hill, Ireland June 23, 2018. (Photo by Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters)

Actor Sophie poses on September 5, 2022 in various locations in character at the Goodwood Race Track ahead of next week Goodwood's Revival meeting (16-18 September). (Photo by Peter Tarry/The Times)

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)

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)

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)