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.

Fabrice Monteiro travelled to the most polluted places in Africa and created terrifying characters who roamed their midst dressed in eerie debris. They are spirits, he says, on a mission to make humans change their ways. Informed by Africa’s environmental problems, Fabrice Monteiro’s photographs aim to highlight urgent ecological issues all over the world. His series “The Prophecy” is on show at Photo Basel 2017 until 18 June. (Photo by Fabrice Monteiro/Photo Basel 2017/Mariane Ibrahim Gallery/The Guardian)

Activists attend a parade to demand rights of gender equality to LGBT community members in Santiago, Chile, November 25, 2017. (Photo by Ivan Alvarado/Reuters)

An effigy representing Judas Iscariot burns as some people wearing masks watch during Holy Week in the Catia neighborhood of Caracas, Venezuela, Sunday, April 4, 2021. The Burning of Judas is an Easter-time ritual in many communities, where an effigy of Judas Iscariot is hanged on Good Friday, then burned on Easter Sunday. (Photo by Matias Delacroix/AP Photo)

People take pictures with their mobile phone of a scale model of a dinosaur displayed in front of La Sapienza University headquarters in Rome April 10, 2015. The realistic reproductions of dinosaurs are part of the “Dinosaurs in the flesh, science and art bring to life the rulers of a lost world” exhibition. (Photo by Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters)

A woman along with a child walk past a wall mural in Mumbai on November 29, 2022. (Photo by Punit Paranjpe/AFP Photo)

Participants hold red scarves as they celebrate the “Chupinazo” marking the start at noon sharp of the San Fermin Festival at Castle square in Pamplona, northern Spain on July 6, 2013. Ten of thousands of people packed Pamplona's streets for a drunken kick-off to Spain's best-known fiesta: the nine-day San Fermin bull-running festival. (Photo by Pedro Armestre/AFP Photo)