Tina Rowden / AMCMackenzie Davis stars as Cameron Howe in the television series, “Halt and Catch Fire.” The AMC drama, which debuted June 1, is set during the 1980s’ race to develop and market personal computers.

“I love seeing the insides of things,” Mackenzie Davis said, tucking her bleached bob behind her ears, a giraffe’s neck expanse above her slashed and safety-pinned Bart Simpson T-shirt. “It just fascinates me and always has.”

Davis, 27, was defending her pastime of choice. (More on that later.) But she could have been describing Cameron Howe, the gorgeously punk geek in “Halt and Catch Fire,” the new AMC series about a tech triumvirate — including the visionary Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) and his sidekick, Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) — attempting to reverse-engineer an IBM PC during the 1980s computing boom in Texas.

Lest Cameron be mistaken for the token hot girl — she opens the pilot by energetically bedding her potential employer — Davis took the role only after being assured that the show’s writers envisioned a female computer genius equal to her male peers. “I’m not interested in playing a character that’s just a sexy, spicy rebellious thing that’s going to add a little fire to the office place but doesn’t actually have an inner life of her own,” she said.

A transplant from Vancouver, British Columbia, by way of the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in Manhattan, Davis has earned praise as a teenage swimmer in Drake Doremus’ film “Breathe In.” In August, she’ll star alongside Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan in Michael Dowse’s romantic comedy “What If.”

Off hours, Davis is up to her elbows in large pots of regurgitated fur and bones found in owl pellets, which she reconstructs into mythical creatures out of Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Book of Imaginary Beings.” “I was always a little macabre,” she said.

Davis, whose scary side is tempered with a warm intelligence, spoke with Kathryn Shattuck about the pressure to be pretty and a certain provocative word. These are excerpts from their conversation.

Q. Cameron Howe is your first lead in a TV series. What drew you to her?

A. I view Cameron as embodying the hacker ethos in a very literal way. Hacking is manipulating and working within an already existing system to get something else that you want out of it. I think Cameron enters this system, Cardiff Electric, and hacks it, and it becomes a different thing. And there’s this whole world and a history and a future and really strong ideas that are rooted in this character. She’s flawed in a way that I don’t think women often get to be.

Q. Yet she does bring heat to the series. Do you have any qualms about doing sex scenes?

A. No, I’m always surprised when actors say they don’t like sex scenes. It’s like a freebie. It’s fun to make out with someone. So yes, thumbs up on that. It was a little awkward watching it next to my dad at the premiere. I think I was just curling in a ball, like “Dad, don’t look.”

Q. What about Cameron’s distinctive style?

A. Cameron’s wardrobe and haircut are motivated by utility. Would she be wearing black nail polish? No. I can’t imagine this character taking time out from her day to paint her nails. She does everything the easier way, because she is so addicted to and obsessed with coding. We thought, “She has a passion in her life, so let’s not make it about her looks.”

Q. At one point your career was all about looks.

A. I modeled for a little while in college. I was desperate to travel, and I got scouted, and they wanted me to go to Paris and London for six months. And I discovered that I hated it. I didn’t like the expectation to be pretty all the time. I rebelled and was like, “Oh, I’ll show you ugly.” I looked like an absolute scrub wherever I would go.

Q. You’ve declared yourself a feminist at a time when other young actresses are distancing themselves from the word.

A. The word has a bad rap as either unappealing or too confrontational. But I think the best thing is to just keep using it until it’s so normalized that no one can have a negative reaction anymore. Feminism is rooted in racial rights and gender rights, and all of those things intersect, and to say that that’s not something you can stand behind — it confuses me. I think it’s a really great word.