HUNTSVILLE, Ala. >> Actor Scott Porter can make sounds with his throat like a trumpet or an electric guitar or even sleigh bells. But somehow that’s not a big seller in show business. Fortunately for Porter he found something else he was good at: acting.

Making musical gurgles doesn’t sound like a sure way to the top. But he says he’s been forced to entertain by his own DNA. “I came up in a performing family,” he explains.

“My mom and dad met in a rock band when I was 6 years old, and I traveled with them quite a bit. I helped my dad set up his drums set, would fall asleep in the bar manager’s office, or play foosball with the bouncer while they played up on stage across the Midwest. So performance was a part of my DNA from a very young age,” he says.

Folks can see the results when they view the affable Porter playing the city mayor in the Netflix dramady, “Ginny & Georgia,” returning on June 5.

As it might sound, Porter’s journey from his native Omaha, Nebraska, to “Ginny & Georgia” was a circuitous one. A self-described “extroverted introvert,” he moved often as a kid as his parents pursued their careers.

While Porter never knew his bio-dad, he is devoted to his stepfather and extended family. “Being a son of artists, which are what my parents are in their hearts, we jumped around a lot,” he says.

“I went to six different elementary and middle schools. I was always the new kid. I was always having to fight to find my place in whatever new situation I was in. Being the new kid puts a little bit of a chip on your shoulder. You have to prove yourself to everybody around you at all times so that you can fit in as quickly as possible and have some type of safety net or find one friend at least to hang onto. And being an only child, that was going through all of those switches by myself.”

It was his love of reading and a vivid imagination that pushed him through. “I would play multi-week campaigns with my G.I. Joes where there would be a full storyline and there would be tragedy and comedy and triumphs,” he chuckles.

He also loved video games and proved an avid reader.

“As a kid I was very just interested in long-form storytelling and being whisked away from my bedroom in Nebraska to incredible lands and other places and living life through those stories.”

The 45-year-old Porter was an only child until he was 7 and then he got a brother — only to lose him two years later. The boy was a foster child, and as Porter puts it, “The state doesn’t always have your back in this situation, and eventually we lost custody of him back to the state and back to his family. And saying goodbye to him was a very large shaping part of my life.”

Two more siblings eventually arrived, but Porter was already 15 when his sister was born, 18 when his brother was delivered.

As a high school graduate, Porter planned to play football and major in structural engineering at Carnegie Mellon, when he unexpectedly snagged a job. “Music was a passion of mine, and I had been performing to help pay my way through school when I was offered a full-time position singing doo-wop music at Universal Studios in Florida. And once I started taking a paycheck to work full time as a performer and realized, at 19, that I might be able to make a living doing this, there was no turning back.”

That job led to “beatboxing,” which is making musical sounds with your voice. Porter traveled the world beatboxing and earned a role in the off-Broadway show “Altar Boyz” which eventually led to an agent.

He had been acting only a year when he landed the role of a lifetime. He played the team quarterback who is paralyzed after an injury in the unforgettable NBC series “Friday Night Lights.”

“To say it changed my life doesn’t begin to approach what ‘Friday Night Lights’ actually did for me,” he says. “There was a trust from the very top of the show with Pete Berg and Jason Katims all the way down to every member of our crew on set.”

Even so Porter suffered a fallow period just before “Ginny & Georgia” surfaced. “I had really been starving for work for about two years. I wasn’t booking anything, and I looked at my wife and I said, ‘I think I need to do something to jump-start my career again and I don’t know what that is.’ And I was scared that was this my time. Do I never work again? And am I not good enough anymore?”

He was performing in local theater when the pivotal role in “Ginny & Georgia” appeared. While Porter’s engrossed in his work, he’s also a steadfast family man.

He’s the father of two children, and his wife of 12 years has been diagnosed with Huntington’s disease.

Porter is in Huntsville to support a charity which seeks to educate people about the disease and to eventually find a cure.

And so far, his wife, Kelsey, is without symptoms. “But from the moment that she found out she had HD, she looked at me with a stillness that I still can’t describe to this day and said, ‘It was a 50-50 shot. It was a coin flip, and it came up tails.’

And within two hours, a drive home and a quiet lunch at home, she turned to me and said, ‘I want to be a mother as long as I can, so let’s figure out how to have kids safely.’ And we did. We went on a very long journey with IVF to make sure that our children did not have the Huntington’s gene.”