Students perform traditional dance as they take part in Pongal celebrations, the Tamil harvest festival, at a college in Chennai on January 10, 2024. (Photo by R. Satish Babu/AFP 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.

A tourist watches as the moon passing in front of the sun as it approaches a full solar eclipse in the northern Australian city of Cairns November 14, 2012. (Photo by Tim Wimborne/Reuters)

A picture made available 27 November 2015 shows a handler putting his head between the gaping fangs of a crocodile during a show at the Samutprakarn Crocodile Farm and Zoo, Samutprakarn province, outside Bangkok, Thailand, 26 November 2015. The farm and zoo claims to be the world's largest crocodile farm with more than 80,000 freshwater and marine crocodiles, and offers shows such as crocodile wrestling to attract tourists. (Photo by Diego Azubel/EPA)

Horse riders perform with guns during the El-Jadida International Horse Show in El-Jadida, south of Casablanca, Morocco, October 15, 2016. (Photo by Youssef Boudlal/Reuters)

A participant blows on yellow powder held in her hand during a Holi Party before the Gay Pride Parade in Barcelona on July 9, 2016. (Photo by Lluis Gene/AFP Photo)

A Sikh warrior, wearing a huge turban attends the annual fair of “Hola Mohalla” in Anandpur Sahib, in the northern Indian state of Punjab, Monday, March 17, 2014. Believers from various parts of northern India collect at the religious fair to celebrate the festival of Holi in a tradition set by the tenth Sikh guru Guru Gobind Singh in the seventeenth century. Nihangs, or Sikh warriors, display their martial skills and attire during the fair, believed to be maintained in the exact tradition as set by the Guru. (Photo by Altaf Qadri/AP Photo)

Nur Elita, an Acehnese woman, screams during caning as part of her sentence in the courtyard of Baiturrahman mosque in Banda Aceh, Indonesia's Aceh province December 28, 2015. Nur Elita received five strokes of the cane for having pre-marital s*x with her boyfriend, according to local media. Aceh is the only province in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, where Islamic law is implemented, according to local media. (Photo by Junaidi Hanafiah/Reuters)