Your job is to bring accurate detail to Diane Kruger's portrayal of a police detective who is on the autism spectrum. What is your personal story?

I was diagnosed when I was nine. I was diagnosed because I was always different. My mum noticed something different about me; I was always staring around and looking at things rather than crying. I had trouble making friends. In early school I would ask people to be my friend and, oddly enough, it worked more than it should have. I would make friends and then I would lose them. Kids are very judgmental and once you do one thing they just give you that label and you can't change that; it's hard to recover from that. I was in the gifted room, and that gave me some self-esteem, but that's not enough. What I did was, when I was 17, I started my website, wrongplanet.net, and from that I ended up speaking around the world.

Real issue: The Bridge's Detective Sonya Cross has Asperger syndrome.

How did you end up working on The Bridge?

The producers invited me into the writers' room and they grilled me for three hours about everything. I told them my story. About my website, and about what it was like growing up, not knowing anyone with Asperger's. I watched the pilot and I had a bunch of notes for them, about things I thought they should change, and things I thought were good. For example, Sonya didn't smile in the pilot, and I know she didn't smile in the original [version of The Bridge, from Denmark] and I thought that was wrong. I know a lot of people with autism and they smile at least once in their lives. Now I sit with the director, the writer and sometimes the producers and if there is anything I see that I think will work better, I will let Diane know.