In real life, Portia de Rossi is married to talk show host Ellen DeGeneres.

In a new television series, the actress will be married to a tall man named Herman, who happens to be a monster.

De Rossi has just been cast in the role of Lily Munster in NBC's Mockingbird Lane, an update of the 60s sitcom The Munsters which had a family of friendly and outgoing working class monsters living in a dusty Gothic mansion.

The new series will differ from the original, which ran for two seasons on CBS and gained enduring popularity in reruns. Instead of being a half-hour comedy,  the remake is being billed by NBC as a 'visually spectacular one hour drama,' according to TV/Line.

The series also has two major gay talents calling the shots behind the scenes: Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller and X-Men director Bryan Singer.

For de Rossi, Mockingbird Lane is the latest series role in a highly successful television career that began with her role as lawyer Nelle Porter on Ally McBeal and continued with her role of Lindsay Bluth the Emmy winning Arrested Development.

More recently, she played the high-strung, over-sexual, and controlling Veronica Palmer on the ABC sitcom Better Off Ted and appeared in the fifth season of Nip/Tuck as the girlfriend of Joely Richardson's character.

De Rossi became available for Mockingbird Lane because The Smart One, a pilot she starred in for ABC which was produced by DeGeneres, was not picked up as a series.