Mackenzie Davis has probably caught your eye before—if not in last year's The Martian, where she played the pivotal role of the nighttime NASA technician Mindy Park, then perhaps in 2014's That Awkward Moment, or 2013's What If, as the scene-stealing girlfriends of Miles Teller and Adam Driver, respectively. And if you haven't seen her performance as the talented, tortured computer-programming prodigy Cameron Howe on Halt and Catch Fire, well, you should fix that. You can even get started tonight, when the third season of the critically acclaimed '80s drama about the personal computer revolution premieres on AMC.

Cameron faces new challenges this season as she relocates her budding startup from Dallas to the region of California that's just becoming known as Silicon Valley—and relocates her life along with it. Like Cameron, Davis is headed westward and onward to bigger things; the 29-year-old Canadian has been house-hunting in California herself. That is, when she's not in Budapest filming the long-awaited Blade Runner sequel, or in London or South Africa shooting scenes for the upcoming season of Black Mirror. In the next few months, Davis is sure to catch your eye on a screen somewhere once again—and she spoke to GQ about the third season of Halt, how she ended up in the sequel to her all-time favorite movie, and those rumors that she'll play Domino in the next Deadpool movie.

So you're between stints in Hungary. How’s Budapest this time of year?

Budapest is beautiful this time of year! I’d visited once in November and it was super beautiful and sort of spooky—because it was winter and it felt old, I guess. But in the summer it’s just lush and gorgeous.

Back in America, Halt and Catch Fire starts this week. You’ve been playing Cameron Howe for three seasons now—is Cameron someone you’d be friends with?

Um… you know, probably not! I think her relationship with Donna is a pretty unique one, but I’ve always had the opinion that she doesn’t play well with other women. She has so many emotions herself that having somebody else to negotiate with, other than Donna, it just seems… I don’t know. I think she might be a shitty friend. [laughs]

I get that. Cameron's a unique character, too, in that there are plenty of portrayals of geniuses who don’t quite know how to handle their emotions, but more often, they’re men.

Yeah! And she has almost a surplus of emotions. She has, like, a stunted ability to process them, so it comes out in weird ways. Growing up is a chore for her—and becoming an emotionally mature human being is difficult, but she wants to. She’s learning in this awkward, aggressive way.

The second season of the show was so, so terrific, and the stunt Cameron pulls at the end of the season—at Joe’s presentation for his investors—is just so surprising and great. What was it like reading that scene for the first time?

It’s funny; Lee [Pace] and I get into so many arguments advocating for our points of view for our characters. Wow, that’s the most annoying actor thing I could possibly say. [laughs]

But we both feel so convinced of having been wronged by the other character that nothing we do seems to compare to the injury we’ve suffered at the hands of the other person. I always see what Cameron does as justified, or as a means to a pure end, even if that’s totally off-base. So when I read that, I was like, “Okay, makes sense.” It was only afterwards, talking to him, that I was like, “That’s cold!”