Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Democratic presidential candidate Clinton defended her decision to not be a "stem winder" in calling to break up big banks, a clear reference to her 2016 challenger Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Clinton told actress Lena Dunham in an interview posted Tuesday that she "took on Wall Street" during her time as a New York senator, but she said bipartisan support is needed to regulate the industry.

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"I may not always be the stem winder about these things, because I think it's important and I've been around Washington long enough to know that you have to get people to agree if you want to get something done," Clinton told Dunham.

Progressives have long raised concerns about Clinton's ties to Wall Street, and Sanders, a self-described socialist, has surged in recent weeks in part because of his rousing anti-big-business speeches.

"You know, some people say, 'All we have to do it break up the banks,'" Clinton continued.

"The problem with that is that the banks did their fair share of trouble, but a lot of problems were not from these traditional banks, they were from what’s called the shadow-banking world like Lehman Brothers, which went belly up and brought a lot of people down with them; or AIG, a gigantic insurance company."

Clinton said she would fully implement the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform law if she were president.

She added that in the Senate and during her last failed bid for the presidency, she tired to "sound the alarm" on some of the "bad transactions with these impossible-to-describe things called derivatives and credit default swaps that we found out later contributed to the recession."

"I feel strongly that the Dodd-Frank legislation that was passed after President Obama took office is a good down payment, but it's not good enough," Clinton said.

"We are now fighting just to get it implemented. … What has not been implemented, I will absolutely implement it, and then I will look for any other abuses that needs to be stopped and curved."