The drag artist Wet Mess performs Testo – a show about testosterone – at the Here & Now Showcase, Edinburgh international festival fringe in 2024. (Photo by Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian)

What would superheroes do if they had a part time job? Well… besides fighting crime, the powers of most superheroes aren’t exactly very useful. Sure, Flash would make a great delivery boy, delivering the freshest pizza in the world, while Thor might turn out to be a great smith (though judging by the way he handles his mallet, it is very unlikely), but in the end of the day, all these things are pretty useless. It sure is hard being a superhero when you have no villains to catch; especially if the only superpower that you have is lighting yourself on fire. Reducing you to a mere job of being used as fuel for cooking grilled chicken. Besides, it’s not exactly useful for catching villains either, if you don't plan on burning them alive… (Photo by Chow Hon Lam)

The setting sun illuminates the sky behind wind turbines of a wind park near Neusiedl am See, December 22, 2014. (Photo by Heinz-Peter Bader/Reuters)

Firefighters rescue Dylan, a catalina macaw, from a tree in the Manhattan borough in New York on March 23, 2021. The bird escaped as he was being brought to see a vet by his owner. (Photo by Bill Swersey/Reuters)

Photographer Han Youngsoo captured the ordinary people of Korea as the country emerged from war into an age of prosperity. Han Youngsoo: Photographs of Seoul 1956–63 is at the International Center of Photography (ICP), Jersey City, New Jersey, until June 9, 2017. Here: Seoul, Korea. (Photo by Han Youngsoo/The Guardian)

Children play on an uprooted tree along a beach in Mele, Vanuatu that was once lined with vegetation, now largely lost to storms, erosion and other environmental pressures on Saturday, July 19, 2025. (Photo by Annika Hammerschlag/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.

Indigenous Sahrawi girls play on an improvised see-saw at a refugee camp of Boudjdour in Tindouf, southern Algeria March 3, 2016. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is scheduled to visit the Sahrawi refugees in south-west Algeria's Tindouf region. (Photo by Zohra Bensemra/Reuters)