Method Acting

Some people do it better than others:

ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) - A judge locked up killer Clifton Bloomfield for 195 years, but now the multiple murderer is out--on video--in a movie role he filmed between homicides.

Bloomfield described himself as trustworthy and reliable a year and a half ago when casting director David Córdova was auditioning extras for the Sony Pictures movie " Felon " starring Steven Dorff and New Mexico resident Val Kilmer.

And he got the movie role he was seeking playing a convict in a violent prison drama. He already had killed two people, and a month after "Felon" wrapped he resumed his real-life killing spree.

"We're expecting actors to come to our casting calls," Córdova told KRQE News 13. "I'm not expecting the real thing to come through.

"I don't think anybody else was actually aware that we had cast a mass murderer on the film."

Last October Bloomfield pleaded guilty to murdering five people in four separate crimes.

When Bloomfield showed up at the open casting call for "Felon" he said he was an actor with previous experience in the movie " To Live and Die ," which was filmed in Albuquerque, and the cable TV show " Breaking Bad " being produced out of Albuquerque Studios .

"He actually was what he came in to be," Córdova said.

In the movie Dorff plays a homeowner sentenced to three years in prison for killing a burglar who had invaded his home. Kilmer, serving a life sentence, is Dorff's cellmate.

Dorff's character struggles to stay alive behind bars dealing with inmates and violence, away of life all too familiar to Bloomfield. The film was shot in part at the Penitentiary of New Mexico, scene of the nation's deadliest prison riot in 1980.

Bloomfield already knew something about prisons after pleading guilty in 2005 to an armed home invasion in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque.

He was out on probation in November 2007 when he filmed "Felon." A month later he broke into the home of Tak Yi, 79, and his wife Pung Sil Yi, 69, in northeast Albuquerque and killed the couple.

Then in June 2008 he and a friend broke into a downtown home seeking a man suspected of being involved with the friend's wife. However new tenants had just moved in, and Bloomfield shot and killed newlywed Scott Pierce, 38.

That's when police arrested him. In exchange for avoiding a possible death sentence he pleaded guilty to those killings and the 2005 murders of Josephine Selvage and Carlos Esquibel.