Clouds turn shades of red and orange when the sun sets behind One World Trade Center and the Manhattan skyline on Wednesday, November 5, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by John Angelillo/UPI/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

Cuban-Spanish actress Ana de Armas, who played Cuban secret agent Paloma in 2021’s “No Time to Die”. (Photo by Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar)

A girl jumps over a campfire while celebrating Ivan Kupala Night, a traditional Slavic holiday not far from Kiev on July 6, 2013. During the celebration, originating in pagan times, people plait wreaths, jump over fires, and swim naked. (Photo by Sergei Supinsky/AFP Photo)

A police officer stands at a police cordon near the scene of a terror attack in London, U.K., on Sunday, June 4, 2017. A van swerved into Saturday-night crowds on London Bridge, before three men got out and went on a stabbing rampage through nearby bars. (Photo by Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg)

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.

Two women pose as they drink real ale at the Great British Beer Festival in the Olympia exhibition centre on August 13, 2013 in London, England. The festival, which runs until August 17, 2013, has over 24 bars serving over 800 different beers, ciders and perries. (Photo by Oli Scarff)

A little girl takes a picture of a lion in the zoo in Frankfurt, Germany, Tuesday, September 13, 2016. (Photo by Michael Probst/AP Photo)

A reveler wearing sheepfur costume is seen in front of a bonfire on which they burn a coffin symbolizing winter during the closing ceremony of the traditional carnival parade in Mohacs, 189 kms south of Budapest, Hungary, 07 February 2016. The carnival parade of people, the so-called busos, dressed in such costumes and frightening wooden masks, using various noisy wooden rattlers is traditionally held on the seventh weekend before Easter to drive away winter, and is a revival of a legend, which says that ethnic Croats ambushed the Osmanli Turkish troops, who escaped in panic seeing the terrifying figures during the Turkish occupation of Hungary. (Photo by Tamas Soki/EPA)