The first thing I noticed upon my interview with Kristen Stewart for "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Pt. 1" wasn't how stunning she looks with longer, dark hair, but the bandage/apparatus on her right hand.  Having likely answered the same "what happened" inquiry all day long, Stewart kindly answered,  "I hurt it a few weeks ago. I was scuffling with some dwarfs and I pulled a ligament in this thumb. I have bad luck with thumbs. I broke this thumb in 'Breaking Dawn' actually."

Considering Stewart's hands are so delicate it's not surprising she's hurt herself in two of the more action packed roles of her career: a transformative Bella Swan in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Pt. 1 and Pt. 2" and as the title heroine in "Snow White and the Huntsman" currently shooting in London. "Breaking Dawn, Pt. 1" is looking to storm the box office this month, but her "Twilight" injury occurred in the installment that will hit theaters in 2012.

"I'm a vampire at that point and I'm incredibly strong, but I'm not incredibly strong [in real life]," Stewart says. "I'm supposed to stop someone very quickly and it just hyperextended."

But, if we're talking about the final "Twilight Saga" movie we're getting ahead of ourselves, because Stewart has quite the dramatic arc in "Breaking Dawn, Pt. 1."  As many moviegoers and "Twilight" fans know, Bella (Stewart) and Edward (Robert Pattinson) finally tie the knot in a moving ceremony.  Before Bella becomes a vampire, a negotiation of her "living" after a showdown with the Volturi way back in "New Moon," the new Mrs. Cullen shockingly becomes pregnant by her living dead husband.  While even the Cullens are unsure what is growing quickly inside her, Bella stands strong wanting to deliver the (assumed) child.  It's a dramatic jump from the tentative and awkward teenager introduced in the first "Twilight" just three years ago.  Stewart has arguably never been better as Bella, but she won't take much credit for her performance.  She insists much of it is because she's also grown older and any other actress could have pulled off the character's arc.

"I think that naturally would have happened with anyone playing the part. Even just the way it's written," Stewart says. "I've been asked a lot today if I think that this is finally when she became an adult.  I don't think just because you get married and you're in adult situations that all of a sudden that makes you grown up. I think that she found herself awhile back and I think she just seemed crazy to everyone because she saw this light and was like, 'Hey, listen, I know something we just need to fight for it.  And now finally in this one it all clicks and makes sense.  She was right. Everything she's built, as precarious as it looks, she'll do anything to keep it standing and it works and I think that's just part of knowing yourself and knowing you want to be where you are."

"It was really intense," Stewart admits. "It would be incredibly intense for someone to do a human birth scene so this is infused with a very supernatural -- but at the same time the supernatural aspect of this really sums up what I love about this -- [its] close to animalistic, feral, base life issues.  You protect what is yours. And I loved playing that.  There was something really just simple [about it].  One thought only, y'know? Just to pay the pain of it.  She's a machine. She's really impressive in this one because she's so small and so frail, but yet she's not so frail."

You can watch the entire interview embedded at the top of this post.

Look for some candid interviews with Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Elisabeth Reaser, Nikki Reed and more of the "Breaking Dawn" cast over the next week.

"The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Pt. 1" opens nationwide on Nov. 18.

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