Ricky Gervais, Bobby Cannavale, Julie Bowen Pose for New Book ‘Caught in the Act’

Caught in the Act

Caught in the Act: Actors Acting (Glitterari, $65) features — as you can imagine — actors acting. The book comes from director and photographer Howard Schatz, editor and producer Beverly J. Ornstein and writer Owen Edwards. Actors such as Bobby Cannavale (pictured), Amy Poehler, David Schwimmer, Julie Bowen, and Robin Wright, among others, were given note cards with lines on them to act out. Schatz was interested in the creativity of the actors, one of his guiding questions for the book being: “How does a human being take ink from a piece of paper and become another human being?”
Man of Many Faces

Cannavale, who most recently appeared in Blue Jasmine, cycles through a range of emotion. On the left, he's an excitable 10-year-old kid who gets to go to the mall with his 17-year-old brother to help him attract chicks. In the center, it's Cannavale as a junior-high-schooler, sure that the school's young history teacher is into him. On the right, Cannavale is a mall rent-a-cop, convinced that he looks like Brad Pitt. A number of Schatz's photo series shown in the book originally ran in a regular column in Vanity Fair.
Stellaaaaaaaa!

OK, Cannavale isn't reenacting Marlon Brando's famous line from A Streetcar Named Desire. But he captures a similar sense of rage. The description reads: “Your girlfriend dumped you months ago, but you obsess and can’t let go; you see the silhouette of a man on the window shade of her apartment, and you’re yelling up, who the hell is that, that you still love her, how the hell can she do this to you …” When the actors arrived for their sessions, the New York-based Schatz would present them — cold — with 25 different scenarios to run through, each written on a note card. Many of the actors would enact all 25 characters in 30 to 60 minutes.
Total Transformation

“I’ve never gotten to do the job where I’m the homeless junkie, because no one sees me that way, or the one where I’m totally transformed,” Julie Bowen explains in an interview in the book. “That’s the one I’m waiting for. When they say, ‘We see you, like the way we saw Charlize Theron; we can see that you’re ugly. We get it. You are a monster.’ She got to be the monster. One day, just let someone believe that I’m a monster.”
Woman of Many Faces

Bowen is angry, shocked, embarrassed, guilty, enraged and proud. For example, Bowen is a suburban wife at a bachelorette party who has just seen “a massively endowed male stripper drop his pants” (top center). Additionally, Bowen is a Southern socialite confronting her son who got her maid’s daughter pregnant (top right). Schatz presented his subjects with "characters I felt applied to the actor but also pushed them to a place I’d never seen them go."
Julie Bowen

Here, Bowen tries (but fails) to suppress an attack of the giggles. Her scenario reads: “You’re saying good morning to your macho next-door neighbor, whom you just happened to spot through his bedroom window last night wearing a bra and lace panties.” Says Schatz, a former ophthalmologist who didn't become a professional photographer until his 40s: "I want to do portraits that have veracity rather than vanity."
Change of Heart

John Stamos, who most recently worked on Necessary Roughness, confesses in the book in an interview paired with his photos: “The bad thing about me wanting to act was that I wanted a lot of it for the wrong reasons. I wanted to be a star and sign autographs. In my 20s, I realized that I wanted to be an artist and dig in deeper.”
Painfully Awkward

Left: Stamos is a terrified 10-year-old on a haunted house ride. Beforehand, he told his brother it's fake and not scary at all. Center: Stamos strays from Full House’s charismatic Uncle Jesse — he asks his father-in-law to loan him ten grand, promising to pay him back soon. But, he’s not even sure if his father-in-law likes him. Awkward. Right: Stamos is a juvenile delinquent, acting unafraid of his mother's threat that he'll be in trouble when his father comes home.
Keep It Fresh

“I reached all my goals too early on, so I’m trying to stay fresh and learn more,” Stamos admits in Caught in the Act: Actors Acting. “I’m getting back to that place because I’m getting more confident, and I feel like I’ve done some good stuff in the last few years, so I can go, ‘Fuck it, this is who I am, take me or leave me.’”
Showing His Range

Sean Hayes shows his devious side (left), playing “a little kid listening outside the room to your parents screaming at your older sister after you told them you saw her ‘doing that thing’ with her boyfriend."
For the Love of Theater

Hayes says in the book: “Theater allows an actor to fail miserably and everything will be OK, meaning you can take more chances and risks, playing many different roles that you’ll never get the opportunity to do for television and film. You get to fail in theater.”
Forward Thinking

Provocative comedian Ricky Gervais, another of Schatz's subjects, told the photographer that he finds human behavior endlessly exciting. “It will never be usurped by technology or technique. A story is fundamental in any language, nonverbal or otherwise. We have never changed. We haven’t changed for 100,000 years. We still have the same anxieties, the same loves, hopes, dreams, fears.”
Makeover

Gervais demonstrates his ability to transform into a pre-tween dweeb plotting to put a burning bag of dog poop on the principal’s front porch (top left), then morphing into a neo-Nazi trying to convince a TV host that the Holocaust was fake (bottom left).
Makeover Cont.

Other scenarios Gervais took on included being “a black-sheep brother whose sister has made the mistake of inviting you to her chic Park Avenue dinner party, telling the other guests that she was a chronic bed wetter for years” (top right). He also plays “a man watching his four-year-old daughter, in a tiny cap and gown, getting her degree from an elite preschool, reassured that the $35,000 was worth it” (bottom right). Caught in the Act is Schatz's 20th book. Previous works include last year's At the Fights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing and Passion & Line: Photographs of Dancers. Upcoming: a 25-year retrospective.

Caught in the Act

Man of Many Faces

Stellaaaaaaaa!

Total Transformation

Woman of Many Faces

Julie Bowen

Change of Heart

Painfully Awkward

Keep It Fresh

Showing His Range

For the Love of Theater

Forward Thinking

Makeover

Makeover Cont.