Iberia Parish Courthouse personnel know Jim Viator. He’s the black-mustachioed guy always present at council meetings — always.

He sits there, usually quietly, taping the meetings. He occasionally will voice his opinion, especially about the proposed Bedminster composting project that rankles Viator, whose current profession is as an indoor-air specialist who performs air-duct decontamination in homes.

“I know what microbes can do to people,” the New Iberia native said. “This stuff goes deep with me, this Bedminster.”

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What you may not know about the 60-year-old Viator is he’s an actor, a Cajun-accented voice-over source for films, a Cajun-French playwright and a performer of vignettes for the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville. He also acted as a Cajun man in the recent movie “All the King’s Men” with Sean Penn.

Strangely enough, he’s actually Spanish — which he can speak, along with French.

“It’s really spelled ‘Viatoro,’ ” the preserver of Cajun culture said this week. “So, Viator is really Spanish. That’s what’s strange about this.”

Viator was born in 1947 on Phillip Street near Bayou Teche, next to the old Trappey’s. He’s been married to Laura Trahan Viator for 36 years. They have four children — three boys and a girl — and a granddaughter.

His first job in 1967, while still a University of Southwestern Louisiana student, was selling P.F. Collier Encyclopedias door to door.

“You asked me if I ever had acting lessons?” Viator said. “Well, that was some acting! You knock on those doors, and you don’t know what you’re gonna get. I learned a lot about people. I learned that sometimes they answer the door with nothing on.”

Viator laughs about it now, but back then some communities frowned upon solicitations, and he was arrested at least twice. The stays in jail, once in Pineville, were brief. But the 1965 New Iberia High School graduate left that job as soon as he finished his degree at USL in foreign languages and history.

It was the time of the Vietnam War, which he managed to avoid because, basically, the Army just never called him back.

Viator had signed up like others in his class did, noting that he spoke several languages. He thought he would be on the bus to New Orleans with his buddies. U.S. Army officials said they’d be in touch, that they could maybe use him as an interpreter. They never got back to him, “and I never called them, either. Eight of my buddies died. I probably would have been one of them.”

Though he’s had no acting lessons, a Dale Carnegie self-improvement course he took as a 19-year-old “made a big difference in how I communicate with people.” Before that, in high school, he had a teacher who required students to present a newscast without a script.

“I was good at it, too,” he said.

After he graduated from college, he moved to Houston for three years to work as an international manager for Airborne Freight Corp. His Spanish helped for that job. From 1973 to 1990 he was in the oilfield rental business, but left that to start his current profession.

He’s had no major films in his life, by choice.

“I have a family and I can’t spend any time in California because that’s where you need to be,” Viator said. “There’s certain sacrifices you have to make. And I wanted to stay close to family.”

Recently, he had a small part in “All the King’s Men.” Viator is still miffed that his scenes were cut to where you can barely see him in the film — which was not well-received by critics anyway.

“That was a total flop,” Viator said of the Huey P. Long movie. “I don’t know who the editor was, but, everybody I talked to about it said this guy screwed up to the max. You’d be wasting your time going to see that. I got four spots, with one kind of close-up.”

As a playwright, Viator wrote “Messieurs, Madames et Mes Chers Amis” in 1990 and presented it 15 times in the Acadiana area. He’s acted as “Papa Noel” in Vermilionville; in “The Grosbecs” in Evry, France, near Paris, in 1988; in “Dormers to Door Knobs” at the Shadows-on-the-Teche in 1989; and in “Tings Dat Go Bump in Da Nite” for a Lafayette dinner theater in 1993, among many other roles.

He performs as French-Cajun character Henri Peyroud for the Acadian Memorial and you can still hear his voice there, too, in the form of Joseph Semer, an Acadian refugee who was a victim of the 1755 British dispersion group from Nova Scotia, Canada. Viator emulates Semer by using his own authentic Cajun-French inflection.

Viator’s surname is Spanish, all right, but French Cajuns, and their heritage, are his passion.

“Think about how that was. Think about what it was like for you to be pulled from your wife and children and all put on separate boats,” Viator said. “Then as you leave, the British burn your house. I tell everybody how that was really a case of genocide.”