Four-year-old Chinese girl Jiaxue, who suffers from hairy black moles, sits on a bed at home November 4, 2006 in Changchun of Jilin Province, China. Jiaxue was born with black moles covering part of her back, breast, neck and face. Experts said the condition may be an atavism. (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)

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.

This cable ropeway suspended between cliffs is the only access to Yushan village in Hubei Province, Chin, which has a population of just over 200 people. The ropeway was built in 1997; before that villagers faced a walk of several days to get to the next nearest village. The ropeway, which is powered by a diesel engine, is 1,000 metres long and 400 metres above the valley floor.

A woman covers her face as men throw colored powder at her during “Lathmar Holi” at the village of Barsana in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh March 9, 2014. (Photo by Anindito Mukherjee/Reuters)

I wanted to create the smoke effects on animals I used on some few of my female subjects.
The hardest part was that while there were only faces, here there was the whole body that needed to be “smokeified”.

Camera trapper Xavier Hubert-Brierre put this large mirror on the side of a road through the jungle in Gabon and left a camera there to record how the animals would respond to their own reflections. A silverback gorilla thought it was seeing another silverback and responded by trying to scare off the potential challenger… (Photo by Xavier Hubert-Brierre/Johns Hopkins University Press)

Guests have breakfast as another guest climbs to gather at the Skylodge Adventure Suites in the Sacred Valley in Cuzco, Peru, August 14, 2015. Tourists taking on an arduous climb up the steep cliff face of Peru's Sacred Valley are being rewarded for their efforts by being able to spend the night in transparent mountaintop sleeping pods at the “Skylodge Adventure Suites”. To reach the pods, visitors need to climb 400 metres of via ferrata (a steel cable and rungs) up the valley side or hike an intrepid trail through zip lines. (Photo by Pilar Olivares/Reuters)

In this photo taken Saturday, January 24, 2015, a child makes a face while having her photo taken with the snow covered slopes of the Nanshan ski resort behind her in Beijing. As Beijing makes a final push in its bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics, Chinese President Xi Jinping says winning the bid will encourage over 300 million Chinese to take up winter sports by 2022, according to state-run Xinhua News agency. (Photo by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)