New York ? Jeff Goldblum still gets a little misty-eyed about the power of Broadway.

It’s where he got his start, in 1971 in a musical version of “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” His eyes well up when he tells of a recent return to Broadway to see “Wicked,” the musical about the witches from “The Wizard of Oz.”

“By the end of it, Ohhh! I couldn’t believe it. They were best friends? I was just bawling,” he says.

So it should come as no surprise that Goldblum has made his way back to the Broadway stage, this time with a role in the searing Martin McDonagh play, “The Pillowman.” The play, which won an Olivier Award for best play in London, opens today at the Booth Theatre.

“I’m just a sucker, so I have to do it — I had to do it. What else would I be doing if I wasn’t doing this?” he asks. “I need to. I need to, don’t I?”

Goldblum has built his career playing eccentric scientists and assorted intellectuals who are a little, well, odd. He’s been a mathematician who champions the “chaos theory” in “Jurassic Park,” a fist-fighting computer nerd in “Independence Day,” a scientist-turned-insect in “The Fly,” and more recently, a playboy oceanographer in “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.”

Watching Goldblum’s eyes roam wildly around his bare dressing room as he talks a mile a minute, then slows to a near halt, it’s clear that the actor has a quirk or two himself. He chokes up again as he reads aloud a review of “The Pillowman” from its London production. His eyes widen as he talks about the pleasures of scary movies.

The overall impression is of a 6-foot-4-inch gangly nerve ready to fire off at any moment. Will he cop to being a tad eccentric? He pauses, gives a long “Ahhhhhhh.”

“That word comes up, so I guess I read that way to other people,” he acknowledges. “I don’t want to be pigeonholed as just eccentric. … Sometimes my take on a part can be a little, if left to my own devices, um, strange, in fact.”

Actor Jeff Goldblum stars in the Broadway production of the play The

It’s those unexpected turns that can make Goldblum’s performances mesmerizing. He’s warm, charming, amusing and yet there are hints he could be quite dangerous.

In “The Pillowman,” Goldblum is an interrogator in an unnamed dictatorship questioning a young writer (Billy Crudup) whose grim fairy tales have started to come true. He’s part amiable and humorous, part terrifying. “I almost forgot to mention,” he quips after his partner jabs a pen into Crudup’s cheek, “I’m the good cop, he’s the bad cop.”

Goldblum felt drawn to the dark comedy for “emotional, psycho-emotional mysterious reasons” after speaking to director John Crowley, who was sure Goldblum was the man for the role.

“It’s a curious part and you need somebody who has a combination of an effortless ease and relaxation and a sense of humor, which Jeff has, combined with being able to be absolutely lethal and quite scary,” Crowley says. “From the second he comes on stage an audience feels relaxed with him and drawn to him. And then a few minutes into the play you think, ‘Wait a minute, who have I just agreed to have a drink with?”‘

Goldblum says that his fiancee, Catherine Wreford, a veteran of “42nd Street” and other musicals, had a small hand in his renewed attraction to Broadway. But he was drawn to the grotesque fairy tales of “The Pillowman” as a reminder of the dark bedtime stories of his youth.

“I’ll tell you, I saw the Disney cartoon of ‘Snow White’ when I was a kid and that witch with the apple, ahhhhhh. It did something to me. I remember the first dream I could ever remember having was about a witch and she had me on a stump. … I’m tied down and I thought she was going to cut my head off.”

But the story takes an unexpected Goldblum twist. “She said instead, ‘Peachessss, peaaaches!”‘ he says in his spookiest voice.