page_title: Halt and Catch Fire (TV series)
section_title: Main
hierarchical_section_title: Halt and Catch Fire (TV series) / Cast and characters / Main
caption_attribution_description: English: From left to right: Actors Danny Tamberelli, Michael C. Maronna, Toby Huss and Rick Gomez during the Pete &amp; Pete Forever event at SF Sketchfest, on January 15, 2016 in San Francisco, CA, US.
context_page_description: Halt and Catch Fire is an American period drama television series created by Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers. It aired on the cable network AMC in the United States from June 1, 2014, to October 14, 2017, spanning four seasons and 40 episodes. Taking place over a period of more than ten years, the series depicts a fictionalized insider's view of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s and the growth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. The show's title refers to computer machine code instruction Halt and Catch Fire, the execution of which would cause the computer's central processing unit to stop working.
  In season one, the company Cardiff Electric makes its first foray into personal computing, with entrepreneur Joe MacMillan running a project to build an IBM PC clone with the help of computer engineer Gordon Clark and prodigy programmer Cameron Howe. Seasons two and three shift focus to a startup company, the online community Mutiny, that is headed by Cameron and Gordon's wife Donna, while Joe ventures out on his own. The fourth and final season focuses on competing web search engines involving all the principal characters.
context_section_description: Lee Pace as Joe MacMillan: an entrepreneur and former IBM sales executive who joins Cardiff Electric and instigates a project to reverse engineer the IBM PC. Joe is a charismatic, slick-talking businessman and a tech visionary obsessed with pursuing "the next big thing", despite lacking technical skills. Owing to his original conception as an antihero, Joe uses manipulative tactics in his endeavors, bending people to his will to get what he wants. He is portrayed as an enigmatic figure with a dark backstory, having left IBM under mysterious circumstances. The Sydney Morning Herald described Joe as an "acutely damaged man underneath the slick suits, bravado and motivational speak", while Pace said his character was hiding behind a persona. Critics compared Joe to the Mad Men character Don Draper. In subsequent seasons, Joe is humbled by his professional failures and how his actions affect other people, and as he comes to terms with his behavior, he becomes a more empathetic character. Pace said that Joe's bisexuality was a reflection of the character being a "mutable person", "a questioner and a disrupter", and someone who "doesn't feel limitations". The idea for the character was inspired by co-creator Christopher Cantwell's father, who was a software salesman. For Joe's personality, Pace recalled "corporate raiders and that kind of spirit of '80s excess" upon reading the pilot, and he took inspiration from real-life figures Steve Jobs, Ivan Boesky, and Michael Milken, as well as the fictional characters Patrick Bateman and Gordon Gekko. Later in the series, Joe initiates projects involving time-sharing, antivirus software (MacMillan Utility), the NSFNET computer network, and a search engine (Comet).
  Scoot McNairy as Gordon Clark: a computer engineer at Cardiff Electric who Joe recruits to reverse engineer the IBM PC and lead the Giant's hardware team. After the failure of the Symphonic, a computer he built with his wife Donna years earlier, Gordon gave up on his dreams and retreated to a dead-end job before having his ambitions reignited by Joe. Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times likened Gordon to Breaking Bad's protagonist Walter White, calling him "apparently brilliant but underutilized in his job, and smugly depressive about his lot in life". Cantwell said the creators cast McNairy in the role because they wanted an actor "who could be a nebbish, with his shoulders shrunken in, but then also reveal himself unexpectedly to be a budding alpha male." Despite not having a background in computing, McNairy related to his character as a fellow tinkerer and builder, drawing from his interest in fixing engines, radios, and air conditioners and his experience in carpentry. McNairy built the foundation of his character on having a chip on his shoulder and something to prove, which were personality traits he came across from researching computer engineers of the past. Critics also compared his working dynamic with Joe to that of Steve Wozniak with Steve Jobs, two co-founders of Apple Computer. Gordon's talents are frequently undercut by poor decisions and bad luck, as well as his deteriorating mental state due to toxic encephalopathy, the result of extended exposure to lead solder; Dennis Perkins of The A.V. Club called him "Halt's tragic hero—the dreamer without the necessary piece to ever truly succeed". In subsequent seasons, Gordon works at Mutiny, runs the CalNect Internet service provider, and co-founds the Comet search engine.
  Mackenzie Davis as Cameron Howe (born Catherine Howe): a computer programming prodigy who is recruited from a university by Joe to join Cardiff Electric and write the Giant's BIOS. The creators made the character female and a punk because they wanted to depict someone who was disruptive to the 1980s corporate culture of the tech industry, while her interest in video games was meant to signify the coming generation and technology. Davis said that her character "doesn't fit into this male-dominated computer world, nor does she fit into the idea of feminine beauty of Texas and the South" with her andr
caption: Toby Huss portrayed John Bosworth.
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