Though she’s only been on Young and Restless for a few months, Tamara Braun has managed to pack in a whole lot of drama as Sienna Bacall, a woman who discovered that the man she was married to was not who she thought he was, that the guy she’d been having an affair with was intimately connected to her spouse’s past and has thus far survived two life-threatening kidnappings by said spouse. Soap Opera Digest got the scoop from the actress about the state of Sienna’s mind and heart in the wake of so much turmoil.

What’s In A Name?

Learning that her club-owning hubby, Mitch Bacall, is actually the devious and murderous Matt Clark (Roger Howarth) with an assumed name was not on Sienna’s bingo card, but that’s the reality she finds herself reckoning with. “Her inner monologue is, ‘WTF!’” chuckles Braun. “Her inner monologue is, how the hell…? I mean, can you imagine? Obviously, she knew that Mitch was a bad boy. But she did not know that he was a bad man, an evil man. I think at this point, she’s having a hard time wrapping her head around who he is and what he’s done. Who wants to believe that they were so hoodwinked? She was so blindsided, and so blind to who this man was.”

Which, understandably, has had a massive impact on her psyche. “She’s thinking, ‘What’s wrong with me not to have seen it?’” Braun says. “It makes her wonder what else she doesn’t know. I think that when horrible things like this start to happen, you start to question a lot of your choices in life. ‘If I was so wrong about this, what else was I wrong about?’ It’s completely destabilizing and she’s completely dysregulated now because she feels like she does not know what end is up.”

All of which is complicated by the fact that, as Braun sees it, Sienna wasn’t faking her genuine feelings for the man she was with for so long. “I think she absolutely did love Mitch once upon a time,” the actress nods. “I think she was so infatuated and loved the attention, loved the adoration, loved them as a couple and how they worked together.”

Love The One You’re With

Of course, there was trouble in Bacall paradise, opening the door for Sienna to take up with Noah (Lucas Adams). Muses Braun, “I think it was one of those situations where [Mitch] love-bombed her — and then once he got her, he stopped paying attention to her. It became all about work. He was controlling and jealous, but also, his attention was elsewhere. And I think when attention is elsewhere, and then he brings Noah into their lives, kept pushing them to spend time together…. When no one’s paying attention to you at home, and you’re not made to feel good about how you are at home and you’ve been pushed into somebody else’s space, things can happen. And they did [laughs]!”

In Braun’s opinion, Sienna’s initial hook-up with Noah was spontaneous. “I don’t think she went into this planning, ‘Oh, let’s do this,’” she says. “I think it was a thing that happened. Noah and Sienna really liked each other, he pursued her…. I think she didn’t go looking for it, but there it was and it felt good. It was exciting and it gave her something she needed that she wasn’t getting at home.”

But her feelings soon blossomed. “She fell for him,” the actress affirms. “I think she didn’t want to fall for him — it’s easier when you don’t! When you fall in love with somebody, the heart just goes where the heart goes.”

And certainly, Matt’s recent attempts to make Sienna and Noah pay for their affair have only trauma-bonded the pair further. “Recent events have really deepened how she feels about him,” sums up Braun, “and I think she feels terribly responsible for all these horrible things happening to him because of her.”