Men who are part of a neighbourhood vigilante group hold a hammer and machetes while posing for a photograph after suspected gang leader Makandal was killed and set on fire, amid an escalation in gang violence, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on March 20, 2024. (Photo by Ralph Tedy Erol/Reuters)

Revellers are sprayed by a water cannon during a street party called “Bloco Das Barbas” in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on February 18, 2023. Hundreds of street parties traditionally take place every year in the city before and during Rio de Janeiro's carnival. (Photo by Carl de Souza/AFP Photo)

A drone view shows the Folkestone White Horse with a red nose that has been placed to make the landmark overlooking the town look like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer ahead of Christmas, in Folkestone, Britain, on December 19, 2024. (Photo by Chris J. Ratcliffe/Reuters)

On the morning of the February 18th, 2025, a foreign tourist wearing a scarf walks past a store window with spring clothes hanging on the street in Myeongdong, Seoul. (Photo by Park Seong-won)

Brooks Nader and her sisters, Mary Holland, Grace Ann, and Sarah Jane announce Season 2 of “Love Thy Nader” with a photoshoot in Los Angeles on November 24, 2025. (Photo by Backgrid USA)

A surfer walks by as starfish cling to a pillar of UC San Diego's Ellen Browning Scripps Memorial Pier in a negative tide during the King Tides which are the year's most extreme high and low tides on December 6, 2025 in San Diego, CA. (Photo by Kevin Carter/Getty Images)

“What did I know about Chechnya before last week? For someone who grew up in the 1990s the very word Chechnya meant a string of grainy images on TV showing people in battered camouflage outfits, shooting at each other amid destruction and ruin. Fear, wahhabis, Shamil Basayev, terrorism, mountains: these were the words that used to spring to my mind when someone mentioned Chechnya”. – Maxim Shemetov. Photo: Special forces officers stand guard during a government-organised event marking Chechen language day in the centre of the Chechen capital Grozny April 25, 2013. (Photo by Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)

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.