People take cover outside the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International airport after a shooting took place near the baggage claim on January 6, 2017 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Officials are reporting that five people were killed and 8 wounded in an attack by a single gunman. (Photo by Joe Raedle/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.

In this Thursday, February 9, 2017 photo, a Bangladeshi boy pulls a rickshaw loaded with strips of leather at the highly polluted Hazaribagh tannery area in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Hazardous, heavily polluting tanneries with workers as young as 14 supplied leather to companies that make shoes and handbags for Western brands, a nonprofit group that investigates supply chains says. (Photo by A.M. Ahad/AP Photo)

Opossums on their mothers back at a game reserve in Central Minnesota, USA, on September 2, 2013. (Photo by Caters News Agency)

The Boeoegg, a giant symbolic snowman made of wadding and and filled with firecrackers burns on top of a bonfire in Sechselaeuten square on April 24, 2017 in Zurich. When the bells of the Saint Peter's church chime six o'clock, the bonfire under the snowman is set in fire and the guildsmen wearing historical costumes ride around the bonfire. The faster the head of the snowman explods the warmer and more beautiful the summer will be. (Photo by Michael Buholzer/AFP Photo)

Employee Victoria Livesey walks past Banksy's “Kate Moss 2005” on display at Bonhams on March 23, 2012 in London, England. The painting, estimated at GBP 30,000 – 50,000, USD 48,000 – 79,000 and 35,000 – 59,000 euros forms part of the Urban Art Sale, which takes place at Bonhams on March 29, 2012. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Earlier this year, Belgian film-maker and artist Vincent Bal stumbled upon an uncanny resemblance to an elephant in the shadow of his tea cup. This gave him the idea for Shadowology, a series of doodles that interact with the shadows of simple, everyday objects: a banknote, some ice cubes and a flower, for example, can turn into a church, a woman and a hippy. “I draw a few lines and I get my image. It’s really the shadows that inspire me”, Bal says. Here: “Stonedog”. (Photo by Vincent Bal/The Guardian)

Born with a rare condition, the artist has chronicled her life in portraits – capturing everything from her tattooed prosthetics to the tentacled creature she stitched together on the shores of Naoshima. Here: Ophelia (2013). From a series of photos of imagined women exhibited at the 2013 Aichi Triennale. Here, Katayama invokes Hamlet’s tragic heroine, after the painting by British pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais. (Photo by Mari Katayama/The Guardian)