Cubans swim in a natural swimming pool off the coast of Havana on August 4, 2023. With the current hot summer, Havana residents have rushed to the dilapidated natural pools on the coast of their city, built by wealthy families in the first half of the last century. (Photo by Yamil Lage/AFP Photo)

Police officers detain a FEMEN naked activist during an action at the Poland embassy in Kiev on October 26, 2020 in support of Polish women in their right to abortion. (Photo by Sergei Supinsky/AFP Photo)

Family members mourn the passing of Manuela Chavez, who died from symptoms related to the new coronavirus at the age of 88, as a government team prepares to remove her body from inside her home, in the Shipibo Indigenous community of Pucallpa, in Peru's Ucayali region, Monday, August 31, 2020. While the lucky are cured with ancestral ailments, the less fortunate often die at home. A government team travels from one spartan, thatch-roofed home to the next, removing the dead from their homes where they took their last breaths. (Photo by Rodrigo Abd/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.

Immigrants from the West Indies at Victoria Station in London, 1956. (Photo by Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

A child travels in a pickup truck next to a coffin in Les Cayes, Haiti, Monday, August 16, 2021. Haitians are searching for survivors and the dead in collapsed buildings following the powerful earthquake over the weekend as hospitals overflow with patients, and Tropical Depression Grace is predicted to reach Haiti Monday night. (Photo by Joseph Odelyn/AP Photo)

American singer-songwriter Billie Eilish in the last decade of October 2023 partners with Gucci to advocate for animals and gives us something to contemplate. (Photo by Instagram)

A Pakistani child, whose family was displaced by 2010 floods from a village in Pakistan's Sindh province, sits on a wooden cart outside her family's makeshift home, in a slum on the outskirts of Islamabad, on February 8, 2013. (Photo by Muhammed Muheisen/AP Photo)